How To: Play Your Favorite Game Boy Advance Games on Your Android /Nexus 7 Tablet

How do you begin to explain the nostalgia that's felt when you play a game from your childhood? You can't. The only thing that will alleviate this feeling is experiencing it again. So let's set up our gba emulator for android!

Step 1 Download the GBA Emulator

There are a few emulators available, but the most popular one, which I find extremely easy to use, is MyBoyFreeEmulator. You can download the free full version here.

Step 2 Download the Game ROMs

If you have the technical expertise, you can choose to backup your old Game Boy Advance games into ROM format on your computer, but the process is a lot of freakin' work. It's a lot easier to just download the digital ROMs off websites like CoolRom for the titles you own physical copies of already.
Make sure they're MyBoy! compatible (it accepts .gba, .bin, and .zip files), then download them onto your Nexus 7. The most popular games are the Pokémon and Mario games. Searching by "most popular" will almost ensure you get a game with no glitches. You can download Pokemon Emerald from here.

Step 3 Loading the ROM in MyBoy!

You now have a game ROM and Game Boy Advance emulator installed on your Android/Nexus 7, so open up MyBoy and search for your ROM file. In my case, I went to Downloads -> Pokemon Emerald.zip, but MyBoy should automatically open to downloads upon initial use.

Step 4 Customize Your Control Layout

Before playing a game, why not take advantage of the layout settings? When you're in the app's main screen, select the wrench on the top right, or if you're in a game, select the option button.

From the layout screen, you can move the buttons around, change their size (by moving direction arrows in and out), and you can also move the screen. Screen options, such as size and orientation, can be accessed by pressing and holding the screen image.

Step 5 Save Your Progress

The full version allows you to easily save your game from any point by pressing their option button and hitting save, but like the dev explains, you can also save in-game like you normally would on a GBA using the free version, as long as the game has in-game saves.

Multiplayer

To connect with other friends to play together or exchange pokemon make sure you have both the same version of MyBoyEmulator. Access the MyBoyEmulator menu and select the Link Remote entry.

Here one of the two players will choose to be the server and the other will be the client. Decide whether to connect via Wi-Fi or via bluetooth. Once connected the two phones, or via IP address (Wi-Fi) or via bluetooth connection, just start the usual procedure for multiplayer pokemon.

Download  MyBoyEmulatorFreeFullVersion    Download  PokemonEmerald