My OldBoy! - GBC Emulator

Review by eFreeware

If you still have a folder of Game Boy and Game Boy Color games sitting on a hard drive or an SD card, My OldBoy! is built for exactly that situation. It is a paid emulator from Pixel Respawn LLC that runs those games on Android hardware, from old budget phones up to current tablets, and it handles both generations of the handheld in one app. The appeal is straightforward: one purchase, no advertising, and a set of tools that go well past simply drawing the screen.

It has been on Google Play since March 2014 and has passed 500,000 installs, with a 4.2 average from around 8,700 ratings. Those numbers suggest a settled, long-running project rather than a newcomer. The most recent update, in August 2026, was aimed at keeping it current with newer Android versions.

What you need before the first game loads

The app ships without any games. You are expected to obtain your own in a legal way, put them on an SD card, and point the emulator at them from inside the app. That is the whole setup premise, and it is worth being clear about it before spending money, because the emulator is only as useful as the library you already own.

The developer describes the emulation core as written partly in ARM assembly code, with the promise of reaching 60 frames per second without skipping frames even on very low-end devices, and pitches it as battery-friendly.

There is an OpenGL rendering path for hardware that supports it, plus a normal rendering mode for devices without a GPU. That second option matters if you are thinking of running this on an older or cheaper handset, since it means the app does not assume modern graphics hardware.

Playing through a game

Once a game is running, the control scheme is an on-screen keypad with shortcut buttons for loading and saving. A layout editor lets you set the position and size of each on-screen control individually, and the game video can be resized and moved in the same way. If you would rather use physical buttons, external controllers work through either the Android native route or as an input method.

Save states are the feature that changes how these games get played. You can capture progress at any moment and jump back to it instantly, and each save can carry a screenshot so you can tell them apart later. Saves can also be synced with Google Drive, which is the sort of thing that matters if you move between a phone and a tablet.

Speed control goes both directions. Fast-forward lets you skip through long stretches you have already seen, and the developer says it can reach as fast as 50 times normal speed depending on the hardware. There is also a slow-down option for getting past a section that is too quick at normal speed. For anyone who has replayed a role-playing game for the fifth time, that combination is more useful than it sounds.

The features that go beyond emulation

My OldBoy! emulates hardware extras rather than just the processor. Two copies of the app can be linked for cable play, whether they sit on one handset or talk to each other over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, so trading and battling still work in titles that used a link cable. Rumble and tilt are handled through the phone's own vibration motor and motion sensors, so titles that used those accessories behave closer to the original.

Game Boy Camera and Game Boy Printer emulation are also included, along with Super Game Boy palettes. That last one is a nice touch for monochrome cartridges: you can pick a custom palette and give a black-and-white game some color. Cheat support covers multiline GameShark and GameGenie codes, which can be switched on or off while a game is running rather than only before launching it.

There is IPS and UPS ROM patching for translated or modified game files, and GLSL shaders for video filters if you like a particular look on screen. The app also supports separate screen-layout and key-mapping profiles, so you can keep one arrangement for a platformer and another for something that leans on the D-pad, and switch between them without rebuilding anything. Shortcuts can be placed on the home screen to launch individual games directly.

What it costs, and what it does not ask of you

The app costs $3.99 as a one-time purchase. There are no ads and no in-app purchases, which is unusual for this category and makes the price easy to judge: you pay once and the app does not try to sell you anything afterward.

The trade-off is that the emulator itself is the only thing you are buying. Games are not included, so the total cost of getting started depends entirely on what you already own legally. The content rating is Everyone, and the app is not affiliated with, authorized, endorsed or licensed by Nintendo or its subsidiaries.

Where the experience asks more of you

This is a tool rather than a curated collection, and it assumes a certain amount of willingness to configure things. The layout editor, key-mapping profiles and cheat entry are all optional, but they are also where much of the value sits, and someone hoping to install the app and immediately start playing may find the first stretch more administrative than they expected.

Link cable play over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi is more involved than passing a cable between two handhelds. The developer describes the speed as decent in that mode, which is a fair signal that wireless linking is a convenience rather than a perfect substitute for the original hardware.

The features tied to specific hardware are only as good as the phone running them, so on a very basic device some of the extras are out of reach.

A one-time purchase for people with cartridges to revisit

The combination of save states, Google Drive syncing, speed controls and link cable support covers the practical side of revisiting these games, and the hardware extras like rumble, tilt, Camera and Printer emulation go further than a basic player would.

The narrower fit is anyone expecting games to come with the app, or anyone who wants a fully automatic experience with no setup. You supply the ROMs, you point the app at them, and you decide how much time to spend on layouts and profiles. For a $3.99 one-time price with no ads and no in-app purchases, that is a reasonable exchange if the library is already yours.

I would suggest it to players who keep a specific set of handheld games in rotation and want them handled properly on Android, including the multi-device and accessory features that most casual emulators skip. If that describes your situation, the price is easy to justify.

What's new in version 2.0.3

• Targeted the latest Android.