Seriously, the complaints about GBA games being pixelated is the most hilarious thing I've seen in a while. No shit it's pixelated, the GBA had a screen resolution of 240x160.
It's disgusting these 20 year old games aren't retina enabled ! Plus no game centre or achievements! I want a refund on my free emulator which can okay 100s games ! (Seriously though I agree with the above. They're frickin old gameboy games and as Eli said at a lower resolution)
Actually most of games look very good considering how much stretching is done, especially on iPad screen.
Ditto. I don't get the complaints. Some folks lack perspective here. The GBA screen was probably 1/6th of the screen size of my iPad and no where near the resolution. Besides, I think the pixelation adds to the charm, personally. The games play well and that should be the true concern here, at least in my opinion...
On the off chance that I'm not a moron, and not new to this whole "emulation" thing... Compare to gpSPhone and GBA.emu. The problem does NOT exist on those emu. Devs can implement filters, and smooth scaling. If you have a Vita, when you play PSP games you have an option for just that. I'll upload a comparison. It's a little bit zoomed in, so may not be the best view (had to crop to get them all in). On top of each example is GBA4IOS 2. On bottom, GBA.emu. Broglia's emulator has a filter, similar to what Sony uses as I mentioned above on Vita, that smoothes it out. It gives a slightly blurry look (a bit pronounced here due to my cropping, normally not an issue) that softens the edges and makes the image and the text less of an eye sore. It's especially useful if you play a lot of RPGs. Again, this is cropped, so the effect isn't as severe. But at full screen, the filtered images look about the same, and the unfiltered ones look worse. Obviously the games are pixelated, but there are tools to mitigate the effects of blowing these games out. I could see how you may not know this if you've never played a GBA emulator that ran natively on iPad...but if you've played the other two, you should know this. Oddly, if you are jailbroken and use retina pad to put it in iPhone mode, ios7's filter kicks in and fixes it.
As this supports GB/GBC/GBA you've got a few options for Pokemon. Red/Blue/Yellow The original 1st generation games with the most famous 150 Pokemon. There's no real reason to play this beyond nostalgia to be honest (for a reason I'll get to), although if you've got one of those cool Gameboy iPhone cases it is cool to turn it over and see this monochrome spectacular actually running on your device. Gold/Silver/Crystal The second generation. Much bigger, much longer, plenty of new mechanics, and it looks a bit nicer because it runs on GBC. Basically everything you'd expect from a sequel. You may as well play Crystal, which is the traditional "released a bit later, updated version of the other two" Pokemon game that's released (almost) every gen. Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald The third generation, and the only brand new Pokemon games for GBA. Loads of new Pokemon, the nicest looking Pokemon game you can play with this emulator, and...yeah. My personal opinion is this is quite a weak generation, but only in comparison to the others. If you want to play this one first, go for it. FireRed/LeafGreen Now we're talking! They remade the original Red and Blue for GBA. An all time classic adventure, updated with new graphics and gameplay tweaks while retaining pretty much everything else. It's a great place to start Pokemon. That's it for the official games. As mentioned, there are loads of good quality hacks, but I can't think of any I'd recommend to a newcomer. Liquid Crystal for example is an excellent remake of Gold/Silver/Crystal for GBA, but the difficulty has been ratcheted up a bit. It's not a shocking challenge, but its target audience is people who know what they're doing.
There is a tiny button I think the lower left hand corner that will bring you back to the menu screen of the emulator.
Great wrap up, I always recommend FireRed and LeafGreen. Captures the originals with enhanced graphics. I happen to be playing through blue as of yesterday since my roommates and I decided to see who could beat the original first...Wish I was playing fire red or leaf green though. The next one that is great is emerald. There is so much as far as legendary's and things like that
I suggest installing "PixMagic" on the iPad! It scales up the GBA's screen resolution to the iPad resolution just by adding similiar pixel blocks until it can show a full-sized, clear and crisp GBA image on your iPad!
That's for the advice guys, I only downloaded emerald as it was the top download, I had no idea what order or anything they came in. Might download the others in a bit
