I recently did some research on the GameBoy Advance emulator on the Google Play store and came across a pretty decent one called John GBA. John GBA works very well on this little portable Android based platform called the GPD XD and pretty much any GameBoy Advance game works very well with this emulator and hardware combo.
After you download the emulator from the Google Play store, when you open the application for the first time, you should identify to the emulator where your GameBoy Advance Rom directory is. It is in this directory that you would have stored your GameBoy Advance ROMs and they would normally reside on your external micro SD memory card. By the way, the John GBA emulator costs about $2 or so and I would recommend buying it as opposed to using the lite version which is free but lacks some functionality and may have embedded advertisements.
It took me a while to understand how to find my external SD card in the directory structure of the GPD XD system and I finally was able to work it out. For those of you who are reading this blog post, I will save you the trouble of trying to figure the path to your external memory card so that your emulators on the GPD XD system can find the ROMs. The path to follow from the root directory is the following:
/mnt/external_sd/Your Rom Directory
Once you have mapped the emulator to your ROM directory you can then go into the settings tab within the John GBA emulator and map your physical GPD XD keys to the virtual key functions within the emulator. You can also tweak the video settings to either maintain the original 4:3 aspect ratio or stretch to full screen mode so that you can enjoy your favourite old school games on the entire screen of your GPD XD. After making those adjustments within your emulator’s settings tab you are now able to play all of your GameBoy Advance games and relive those days when you used to spend hours playing Pokemon, Mario Brothers and Contra.
If you want to get your hands on one of these powerful GPD XD portable game consoles you can get them from Gearbest here. Also, checkout my YouTube video below where I demonstrate the John Gameboy Advance Emulator playing some of my favourite GameBoy Advance games. Enjoy!
