The company has filed a patent that suggests that an official smartphone Game Boy emulator could be on the way.
Nintendo has filed a patent that has now been published which could suggest that the company is looking to greatly enhance its position in mobile gaming by bringing some of its Game Boy titles to smartphones and tablets by way of emulation tech.
The idea of emulators isn’t anything new, but this move by Nintendo is something new on official channels.
This type of mobile gaming emulator is something that can help to make it possible for all of the Game Boy favorites to become playable on smartphones and tablets. There are a number of emulators that already exist online that function by mimicking old types of game consoles to allow gamers to be able to play all of their old beloved games that have been converted into ROM files for PCs and Macs. Nintendo may now be doing the same thing and it could be possible for it to accomplish this goal without having to do a massive amount of rewriting to get there.
Emulators for mobile gaming on a low capability target platform duplicate the experience of a handheld video game device.
This would use a number of different optimizations and features to be able to take the old games and boost the graphics quality and sound so that the mobile game version will be a near duplication of what the game had been when played on its native platform. There have been a number of successful emulators and platforms online, but Nintendo would be able to provide an official and legal experience that has not been available for Game Boy games in the past.
Among the examples of what is accomplished through emulators include using bit BLITing, the reformatting of graphics characters, and the modeling of the LCD of a native platform controller through the use of a sequential state machine, as well as skipping frame display updates selectively if it appears that the mobile gaming play is falling behind what would have occurred in the same experience on the native platform.
The marketplace in India is starting to experience the same level of “app fatigue” being seen elsewhere.
A recent study conducted by Forrester Research in India has shown that consumers will be spending a growing amount of time on their devices, but will be using fewer apps, with a preference for mobile gaming over other types of applications.
The app fatigue that is being seen in other regions of the world is clearly setting in within this country.
This trend has been especially notable in developed markets such as the United States, and Forrester Research stated that it will not take over as quickly in India for a while. The report was entitled “Predictions 2015: Most Brands Will Under-invest In Mobile”. It showed that while device users in India may be showing signs of app fatigue, their love of mobile gaming remained strong.
The report showed that mobile gaming will be, to some extent be immune to the upcoming wave of app fatigue.
The report indicated that smartphone apps are going to start to become less popular among Indian mobile device users, but at the same time, mobile games will start to increase in popularity, to a certain degree. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the average smartphone owner will use an average of 24 apps every month, but 80 percent of their time will be spent on only five of those, as a result of app fatigue.
According to iVoice Ventures’s Venky Vaiyapuri, though many smartphone users are downloading applications, many of those apps will go unused. There are also many applications that remain entertaining only when they are new and that become boring over time. Vaiyapuri explained that there are simply too many apps and this is not appealing to consumers.
He used Angry Birds as an example. While many people download that mobile gaming application, not many will use it or will continue to use it over time. He stated that “We will soon follow the US and UK markets and lose interest in downloading apps.” A Vodafone India spokesperson added that India hasn’t yet reached the level and energy of monetization seen in developed markets.
