There are a hell of a lot of Game Boy emulators out there at the moment. This one, for windows has the added joy of a file requester. This may not seem like much of a recommendation but command line parameter can be a right royal pain in the buttocks. Hello GB has been written specifically for Windows 95 and is not a port from another system like most of them. Lets have a looky then.

Starting this emulator is simple, just double click on it and a blank window appears. From the FILE menu a .GB (standard format for gameboy ROMS) or .GBC (colour ROMS) can be loaded. Unfortunately, this emulator doesn't autodetect the type of ROM so chances are when you first load a ROM it'll be in lovely grey-o-vision. This may mean that it is simply a bog standard GB rom but a quick selection of the other types of GB emulated bring the best out of the cart.

Emulated GBs are :-

• Original B/W Gameboy
• Gameboy Pocket (though these were the same - Oh well)
• Super Gameboy (that thing for the SNES)
• Super Gameboy 2 (is this one for the N64 - I don't know)
• Gameboy Colour
• Super Gameboy Colour (!)

As for the Super Gameboy Colour, I just don't think it's been implemented yet. I tried Bomberman Quest (a colour title) with the setting on Colour GB. Lo and behold a small, un-framed window appeared with the game in (see above). However, changing the emulator to Super GB brought a fancy border around the proceedings at the expense of most of the game's colour. So, knowing it supported both I tried Super GB colour but it jumped straight to bog standard mono original GB. Bum.

While there aren't a great deal of options within this emulator, there are all the options you could really need. The frame rate can be altered to suit your processor speed and can be made to go only as fast as a real GB (handy with nowadays hardware). There is a lack of Vsync for the frame update so a little shearing appears with the scrolling displays. But it's much better than the blurry scrolling of the original GB. There is no support for fullscreen but as it runs faster than most windowed, you can expand the window to whatever size you like. There even appears to be support for the Pocket Printer but I haven't tried that.

Games played fine with this emulator. Controls can be re-mapped and positions can be saved and restored at a later date. Even a RESET option is included which some GB emulators with proper GUIs actually forget on occasion. There were a few roms which refused to run but they could have been bad dumps. A fine and pretty stable emulator with just a small few minor irritations. But nothing too bad.

8/10 - Apart from the lack of autodetection, fullscreen and vsync, this is tops.