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| Product: Liberty GameBoy Emulator |
Company: Gambit Studios |
| Web: www.gambitstudios.com |
Phone: ??? |
| Platform: Palm OS 3.0 or higher |
SRP: US$17
Street Price: same |
Cred Rating: | Special Award: |
The other day, I was tapping away on my Palm IIIx when a friend noticed the card sticking out of the back. "What's that?" he asked, knowing that I'm always the guy with the latest gear. "That's called an axxPac, it holds a 16MB SmartMedia card." "What could you possibly use an extra 16 megs for?," he asked naively. "Oh, ya know, large databases and stuff," I said, not wanting to admit that what I'd really done was load it up with GameBoy games after installing Liberty, the GameBoy emulator.
Liberty is a software emulator for the Palm OS that emulates a GameBoy, much like Bleem! emulates Playstation for the PC. It is designed to replicate the ROM chip hardware that Nintendo GameBoy games are stored on. It turns out that there is a whole gray market in these "ROMs" available on the Internet. To access them, you're supposed to have actual physical ownership of the GameBoy game cartridges, but my guess is that most people don't.
Liberty is a program of about 80k in size, but the ROMs take up significantly more space. Installation of Liberty is straight-forward: unzip and install one file, then register and download the registration key online. Liberty comes with a few "freeware" titles that don't violate anyone's copyright, but these are just a few sample games that aren't really worth playing. The real fun comes in downloading other games from the Net.
Liberty can be configured to provide optimal gray-scale or color graphics. The speed can be adjusted through a "frame rate" function, which either decreases or increases the number of frames of the original game: slow the rate down, and you get better graphics, but slower gameplay. Increase the frame rate and you get choppier graphics, but faster gameplay. With color Palms, each level of gray can be set to represent a different color. While this doesn't provide true GameBoy Color gaming, it makes for a "colorized" version, sort of like what Ted Turner did with "Gone With the Wind." There is no sound on Liberty, regardless of whether the original game had sound. The developers tout this not as a bug but a feature, since it means you won't get caught playing games in your cubicle. The buttons of the Palm can be mapped to whatever commands you want.
Liberty is a solid piece of software. In all my testing (2 sets of batteries worth!), I never once had a crash. It did get a few false starts with versions 1.0a and 1.0b, which had some problems, but those were quickly resolved. You should be warned when using Liberty that, to really take advantage of it, you have to use an overclocker installed on your Palm like Afterburner. Afterburner is a great program that allows overclocking (i.e. speading up) on individual programs. Overclocking is not for the faint of heart, and you should probably keep the speed down to a sensible 26MHz, so as not to risk damaging your Palm's processor.
Quality of gameplay depends on the game installed, and interestingly enough, is not dependent on the size of the game. Most games that you can download range between 95k and 220k, though some are significantly larger (Pokemon Red is almost 2 megs!). I tested OddWorld, Marble Madness (my fav), Tetris, Dr. Mario, Final Fantasy, Aerostar, and Donkey Kong Land. Of these, all played well except Aerostar and DKL. Aerostar was too slow, no matter how it was configured. DKL had problems from the start, and only displayed DK himself in certain circumstances. Only Dr. Mario, Pokemon, and Final Fantasy operated at "full speed." According to the developers, the speed of gameplay is dependant on the code, so how fast something will play is unpredictable. Generally, graphics intensive shooters tend to be slow, while strategy games are faster.
Overall, Liberty is a phenomenal product. Many Palm game programmers will be happy to know, however, that it will not put the native Palm game market out of business anytime soon. The speed is generally too slow to make it real competition with Palm games. In the future, with Palms getting faster processors, Liberty could become a threat...that is if they don't get "Napstered" (i.e. blamed for the illegal activities of their users). My advice: get a copy now and download some good ROMS (only ones you own, of course :-) since this product may not be around for very long.
- Nate Heasley [7/24/00]
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