Legality
As promised, here's some information I dug up on the legality of emulators. But first, a little background on game programming is in order. Basically, enterprising hackers and/or software programmers use PCs to compile their game code. That code is then burned onto an EPROM and eventually mass-produced as the little gray cartridges that cost you $30.

If you can upload to a chip, you can download data over the same conduit--so, again, it's enterprising hackers and/or software programmers who physically move the data from cartridge back to computer.

I did a lot of research into copyright law as it applies to video games for a story a few years back. I spoke with a very nice law professor at length, so I can actually answer this one: Is it legal to own a digital backup of software you own on a hard media (i.e., a cartridge)? Yes. However, the law specifies that your backup must be struck from your own original copy of the game--that is, the cartridge you physically paid for is what you own, and if you want to back it up, you have to figure out how to get it out of there.

You can't legally just take Bob's copy of the same code--even though it's identical--because you didn't physically back up your copy yourself. This is a rider to the law that most people ignore. How on earth would anybody prove that your digital backup of a mass-produced cartridge was not legit? And, so far, nobody has tried to enforce it, since it's all too easy to pass this stuff around.

The magic word that I breezed through there was "distribution." The law of copyright includes the right to distribution, whether it be putting it on a truck or, you guessed it, downloading it over the Internet. So the courts would probably go (and on a limited basis already have gone) after the folks who offer the games for download--even free download--rather than the people who downloaded the games to their personal systems.

Is your head spinning yet or should we get into Napster?

If you want to play it absolutely safe, only use Liberty on your Palm device to play Game Boy games for which you own the original cartridge. If you want to risk it, though, the product availability section of this article contains links to sites where you can download Game Boy games, though they tend to come and go like the wind due to the semi-legal nature. There's no guarantee they'll be there when you click on them.

Dan Amrich is himself a game boy--he's Senior Associate Editor at GamePro magazine. Write him at damrich@gamepro.com.