One of the best, but unfortunately least used, features of the Nintendo GameCube was the ability to talk to a Game Boy Advance. Some games have used it, some exclusively, but now a lot more people can hopefully enjoy the idea with the release of a new version of the popular GameCube emulator Dolphin.
If you’ve never seen the technology in action, the GameCube allowed users to connect up to four Game Boy Advance handhelds to a console and either unlock additional features or even play entire games with the handheld. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and some Pokémon Games are Examples of the former, with a GBA You get access to bonus material that players without a GBA cannot enjoy while Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords The latter were games based entirely on the idea of up to four friends huddling around a GameCube and playing the game on their GBAs.
To do this, you would literally have to connect your GBA to the GameCube using cables (or, in even rarer cases, a wireless adapter). Because it is such a cumbersome solution in the real world, attempts to emulate it have been fraught with difficulty. The ability to do this has actually been around for over a decade, but it has only recently been possible for emulators to get it right, and even then you’d have to run things separately, which was a bit much for the average “I” want play this old game just for fun “kind of user.
The fact that Dolphin has now integrated the support for the GBA by adding the mGBA emulator changes all of that. You can now play these GameCube games with the Game Boy Advance controls and display from the same program. The following video shows the new support in action:
This is very cool, but as the video explains, it actually improves on the original connection methods by adding support for online gaming. The biggest obstacle for anyone who has ever played games like Four swords was not just finding three friends who owned Game Boy Advances, but getting them all to play the game and then all being in the same place to play it at the same time (though that’s a big part of why, why? This is how Nintendo developed the games in the first place). Now friends can simply play online together, which means hopefully a lot more people can enjoy these unique, time-ahead experiences than was possible at the time.
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You can download the new version of Dolphin and read a fascinating story about how the GBA x GameCube emulation got to this point. Here.
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