The crazy cats at Nintendo are looking for other avenues to bring in revenue. This time they have filed a patent to allow for Gameboy emulations on other hardware. This means that you can play Gameboy games on your mobiles, on the seat-back displays of planes, and any other device that isn’t owned by Nintendo, except the other major console players of course.
Nintendo explained that “A low-capability platform (e.g. a seat-back display or a personal digital assistant) may not have enough processing power to readily provide acceptable speed performances, unless the software emulator is carefully designed and carefully optimised, it will not be able to maintain real time speed performance when running on a slower or less highly capable processor.”
It basically means that Nintendo want to develop their own devices in an environment that they can capitalise on. It also means they can tackle the 3rd party developers who have designed emulators to do that job for them. There are a number of popular emulators out there, but the most popular are the Game Boy Advance emulators. Nintendo went on to explain “ A number of GAME BOY.RTM. emulators have been written for a variety of different platforms ranging from personal digital assistants to personal computers. However, further improvements are possible and desirable.”
There has been pressure from fans for Nintendo to get into the mobile market, but they never have. Maybe this is the first step for Nintendo realising the promise that mobile gaming has.
