The Gameboy and Gameboy Advance were/are one of the best handheld gaming consoles ever made, in my opinion. And they were home to some of the best games ever made including Pokemon, Final Fantasy, Mario, Golden Sun and so many other awesome games.
With a Jailbroken iOS device, you can install a Gameboy Advance (GBA) emulator that will allow you to play all those amazing Gameboy games.
Disclaimer: This is for educational purposes, AppDucate does NOT condone downloading copyrighted material illegally.
Properly Setup Gameboy Advance Emulator
For the method that I’m going to go through, we are going to need to need a jailbroken device. If your device is not yet jailbroken I’ve written up simple articles on how to do that here:
Download gpSPhone
Once it’s jailbroken we are going to first download the free GBA emulator then download the GBA BIOS file that is required to get it working properly.
Open Cydia, search for and download the free Gameboy Advance emulator which is called gpSPhone. By the default the emulator should automatically be available for download from Cydia. If it isn’t tap Manage -> Sources -> Edit -> Add: http://cydia.zodttd.com/repo/cydia/
You’re not done yet though, there is one more file needed to get gpSPhone working properly. In previous versions of gpSPhone the developer added the GBA BIOS file (gba_bios.bin), in this revision he has excluded it. Because of that we need to add it ourselves. You can download the file then copy and paste it to /var/mobile/Mobile/ROMs/GBA using an application like iFile.
Download gab_bios.bin
To make things simpler however we’ll take a different, easier approach. We’ll add another source to Cydia and just download the gba_bios.bin file from there and let it automatically add it to the correct location. While in Cydia:
- Tap Manage
- Edit -> Add
- http://repo.insanelyi.com/
Now that the new source is added, search “GBA Bios” then simply download and install it.
With all of that done, we can finally get to downloading the GBA roms (games). Open gpSPhone and tap the Search icon located at the upper right. Now just search for any Gameboy game you want to download and play.
One more thing I should mention, you don’t need to have a jailbroken device in order to play GBA roms on your iPhone and iPad. TouchArcade goes over a method that doesn’t require a Jailbreak. This article goes over the Jailbroken method simply because it’s the method I prefer.
oh my gosh, thank you so much! i have been searching the internet for hours trying to find an easy tutorial like this. much appreciated!
January 25, 2014 at 4:00 pmThanks for the comment Julia, I’m glad to hear you found it helpful.
February 1, 2014 at 11:27 amOh no my cydia says ‘size dismatch’ when i click install for Gpsphone. What should i do? Is the server down?
February 19, 2014 at 3:25 amHey there Brice, I did a quick google search. This should help with your size mismatch problem: http://www.ifans.com/forums/threads/cydia-size-mismatch-error-solution.360209/
February 19, 2014 at 8:46 ami tried looking for the first part the gpSPhone for ZodTTD but all i can find is the 8.3.2 does that really matter?
and when i downloaded from a different area it wouldnt work right what should i do?
April 28, 2014 at 7:52 pmAfter downloading gpSPhone 8.3.2, did you also download the GBA Bios file? Without that it won’t work properly.
April 29, 2014 at 9:56 ami installed everything ans when i click on the game to open it it crashes and closes out….. any ideas?
May 14, 2014 at 2:53 pmI have same issue anybody know the solution?
May 28, 2014 at 5:02 pmHey how would I play a gba game like Mario with saved data across my iPhone AND ipad?
June 15, 2014 at 5:07 pmWell, this is completely hypothetical and off the top of my head; so don’t expect it to work. If you had a jail broken device ( http://appducate.com/2014/01/jailbreak-ios-7-iphone-ipad-ipod/ ) you could possibly use some app like iFile (or alternative) to copy your save game to a syncing service such as Dropbox, then from your other device, copy the save game from Dropbox to your emulators save game folder.
Disclosure: I haven’t looked into this at all. So none of the above may work, but it may be somewhere to start.
June 17, 2014 at 9:19 amwhenever I add the source it tell me its not supported please help
June 26, 2014 at 8:39 amCarlos, is this happening when you try to connect to http://cydia.zodttd.com/repo/cydia/ ?
June 26, 2014 at 9:14 amyes it is happening when i try to connect to http://cydia.zodttd.com/repo/cydia/
Xsellize also has a good gpshone and bios maybe that works for some people
http://apt.xsellize.com/
August 7, 2014 at 5:54 amThanks Rebossy.
August 7, 2014 at 7:41 amMy search bar doesn’t work I’ll tap the search button and it goes to a white screen
September 19, 2014 at 8:50 amWaiting for zodttd to upgrade to 8.1 jailbreak… Still not compatible.
November 8, 2014 at 8:43 am