Official Game Boy and Game Boy Advance emulators may soon be hitting Nintendo Switch Online, porting a slate of classic titles across the handheld consoles.
As shared by Twitter user trashbandatcoot and spotted by Nintendo Life , leaked files of the emulators have been shared across internet forums. They mention an official Game Boy emulator codenamed “Hiyoko” and a Game Boy Advance emulator named “Sloop”. The leaked files contain screenshots of both emulators being tested on a Nintendo Switch , fuelling rumors that they'll be making their way to Nintendo Switch Online sometime in the future.
Both are described as functional, if buggy, and appear to have been developed by Nintendo Europe Research & Development, which has handled several official Nintendo emulation projects in the past, including Nintendo Switch Online’s NES and SNES library.
Twitter user RatgorlHunter shared a recording of the emulators running on a Nintendo Switch. While the account has since been deleted, stills of the videos can be viewed via the Wayback Machine . Kotaku also reports, through its own sources, that the emulator only works on Switch dev kits and has seen footage of the emulator running the Game Boy Advance RPG Golden Sun.
Dataminer Mondo Mega has released a full list of all 40 Game Boy Advance games mentioned in the leaked files. The files show they have been tested for the emulator, and include notable picks like Metroid Fusion, Castlevania: Aira of Sorrow, and The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. The full list includes:
As Mondo Mega highlights, that these games have been tested with the emulator doesn’t necessarily mean they'll be available to play. Rather, they indicate that Nintendo is developing the emulators to be compatible with a range of first- and third-party titles.
Switch dataminer OatmealDome has suggested the leaks show the emulators are in early development and found they will support multiplayer by emulating the Game Boy’s Link Cable, which allowed players to physically connect their handheld consoles to play with or against each other.
Word that Nintendo’s classic handhelds would be emulated for the Switch first broke last year when Nintendo Life and Eurogamer confirmed that Game Boy and Game Boy Color titles will be coming to Nintendo Switch Online. They would join the service’s library of SNES and NES titles.
However, it’s not currently known whether the Game Boy emulators will be available through the base Nintendo Switch Online subscription or its premium Expansion Pack tier, which includes access to N64 and Sega Mega Drive titles. No potential timeframe of the emulator's release has been revealed, either – either officially or through a leak.
Dying Light 2’s bugs have ruined the best part of the game
I’ve played over 20 hours of Dying Light 2 - and I’ve barely touched the main story. What have I been doing, you may ask? Everything and anything else. A survivor in peril? I’m there. A CD needs rescuing from a zombie-infested hollow. I’m your gal. I’m basically an undead-slaying Lassie, here for all your mundane heroic needs.
Protagonist Aiden’s journey to find his sister Mia and unearth the secrets of the GRE testing facilities where they were separated doesn’t interest me. I find joy in Dying Light 2’s busy work; it’s an excuse to explore every inch of the city of Villador and to immersive myself in fast-paced action without the constraints of narrative.
That is until Dying Light 2’s bugs got in the way, turning my much-loved busywork into a chore.
Showcasing strengths
I’m very methodical in the way that I work through open-world games. I always find that I work in sections, completing every task available in an area before moving on to the next - story missions undertaken only as a means to access new opportunities. That way, I can embrace everything the game has to offer without becoming overwhelmed.
Dying Light 2 makes this approach easy: Villador is broken up into districts and its story never makes me feel like I need to know what comes next. What’s more, the world itself is filled with side quests, challenges and encounters to undertake, so there’s always something to do outside of the main storyline.
Sure, the side quests are mostly fetch quests and the writing isn’t amazing, but these extra activities are the perfect showcase of Dying Light 2’s strengths: its world, combat and parkour. And many of these side quests feel like they’re built to showcase these strengths. One had me scaling my way to the top of a skyscraper to find a chest, another saw me slaying a chunky Infected that had swallowed a music box, while encounters are littered throughout the city and provide extra context on the world itself, giving you a peek into the individual stories of the survivors that inhabit this modern Dark Ages.
It’s a world that screams to be explored and the parkour serves as an extremely fun way to do that. There are few areas that feel off-limits thanks to your super-human athletic abilities and plenty of seemingly insignificant buildings to explore as a result. The day-night cycle plays a big part too, as I find myself weighing up the dopamine reward of venturing out for my fix of side quests against facing the Infected roaming the streets. When you do, ultimately, have to face the Infected head-on, they often come in hordes, and there’s nothing more satisfying than mowing them down with your hand-crafted fiery axe. Especially when you can feel the weight of the weapon through the DualSense PS5 controller ’s haptic feedback.
A growing inconvenience
Imagine my frustration, then, when Dying Light 2’s incessant bugs began to rear their ugly head. They were small at first, meer bugbears (pardon the pun). A PlayStation trophy wouldn’t pop or a completed activity wouldn’t be ticked off. Small inconveniences, but frustrating ones for a completionist like me. But then they got bigger.
After a pre-launch patch, I began having even more issues. My beloved sidequests were being affected. First, night-time side quests I had begun were no longer trackable. ‘No biggie,” I thought, ‘I’ll simply go to the quest area anyway and it’ll give it a kickstart’. To no avail. These bugged side quests now sit, incompletable, on my map - and they’re mocking me.
For someone less side-quest orientated, maybe they wouldn’t be a big issue. But it’s been a gradual drip for me. One bug was annoying, but this flurry of them has really impacted my enjoyment of the game.
Dying Light 2 was a game I couldn’t put down, I played hours on end until my bloodshot eyes told me to stop. Now, feeling almost tunneled into playing the game’s mediocre main story and wary of undertaking any more impossible to complete side quests, I’ve found that I’ve cooled on Dying Light 2 and that’s a huge shame - because it has so much potential.
My concern is how quickly - and efficiently - developer Techland can roll out fixes. As we saw famously saw with Cyberpunk 2077 , sometimes fixes can be too little too late. Dying Light 2 is a great game at its core, but the swarm of bugs around it is driving players like me away.
Your phone battery isn't fat, it's just dangerously swollen
My OnePlus 9 Pro battery is so swollen it split open the case.
I discovered this potentially dangerous situation by accident when I noticed the one-year-old Android phone sitting imperfectly in its carbon-fiber case. Absentmindedly, I reached over and pushed one corner of the phone down, trying to reseat it. It popped back out. After a few attempts, I removed the case and discovered the truth: The battery had expanded and split the chrome case along one long-glued seam, creating, in one area, a quarter-inch chasm.
"Not again," I thought.
A few years ago, a Google Pixel 3 XL that I mostly keep on a Pixel charging stand by my bed appeared to jump off the charger of its own accord. It turned out that the battery has expanded so much that the case no longer sat flush with the charging base.
I eventually sent the phone back to Google and got a replacement; at least that phone was more than a few years old. But I reviewed the OnePlus 9 Pro just over a year ago. At the time, I called it "a gorgeous device," and "one of the best devices I've used in the Android space." Even with the split back, it still looks pretty good.
Does it still work? Sure. I powered it up and it launched, like Head Wound Harry , as if there wasn't any critical damage.
Still, I won't use it now or ever again.
As soon as I posted a short video of the split phone on Twitter, I got a fast flood of responses and at least one warning : "I'd, uh, turn it off."
I also found a community of people who have suffered similar battery calamities on a variety of Android phones and iPhones. I've owned and tested every iPhone since the iPhone 4 and never had a battery balloon or case split.
Still the tales of puffy batteries traveled through numerous Samsung handsets, iPhones, MacBooks, and Pixels.
On Reddit and support pages for OnePlus and Google , I found more evidence .
It's a big enough problem that there are FAQs and services devoted to it. I found a place called Bebat that tries to explain why cellphone Lithium-Ion batteries balloon and what to do about it. Yes, it's also selling a repair service.
No one, including Bebat, is certain why all these batteries occasionally puff up. It could be:
It's almost like no one quite understands how these batteries work. Though we know they do - most of the time.
An expanding phone battery and concerns over what could happen next if I keep using or charging it (explosion and fire come to mind) take me back seven or so years to Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 .
The Galaxy Note 7 was an Android industry darling right up until units began to explode and catch fire . The culprit was the lithium-Ion battery.
Before you can understand what goes wrong with such a power source, it helps to understand how most Lithium-Ion batteries work. It's something we all got a crash course in back in 2016.
Like most batteries, there's a positive and negative side, usually made of two different conductive materials (say, aluminum and graphite). Since a battery creates power through chemistry and flow of charged ions, there's also a liquid (called an electrolyte), and a thin plastic layer made to separate the positive and negative sides. The cells charge when we plug the phone in.
Unlike the batteries in, say, your remote control, phone batteries can't be round and thick, nor can everything sit neatly in just two layers. Usually, smartphone batteries fold the layers over and over, sandwiching them to make them thin and as flat (and store as much energy) as possible.
As you can imagine, if all this isn't done perfectly, something can go wrong. In Samsung's case , it was a huge battery being squished into too small a space, deforming some layers, as well as a production issue in which a bad weld perforated these layers in some devices.
Samsung learned its lesson and instituted some rigorous battery oversight and testing for all future devices. There has not been a notable incidence since.
Which is good. But why are our phone batteries still expanding?
Since this issues cuts across devices, it's clearly some intrinsic lithium-ion issue.
Even experts like Bebat don't offer any clear-cut idea of why or what companies could do to prevent this. They do know what you can't do though:
There is no point waiting for the battery to “shrink”. The ever growing pressure can cause damage to the entire device. Leave the battery in the device only if it is stuck. Never try to “solve” the swelling yourself by pricking a hole in it or with any other creative stunt. That is very dangerous: not only is the gas flammable, but also toxic.
In every support forum, the advice is the same. Stop using the device immediately and get it to a service center. One MacBook user claimed to me on Twitter that an Apple Store genius told him to give the laptop to them and "we can put it in back in the special safe in case it explodes."
That sounds dramatic, but an exploding Lithium-ion battery is not out of the realm of possibility .
I don't think I'm in any imminent danger here, but I have turned off the OnePlus 9 Pro and reached out to the company's representatives for comment. My more immediate concern is that, while hardly common, I'm not sure expanding, gas-filled batteries are uncommon .
Making these incidents public is the first step, I hope, in pushing phone manufacturers to be more transparent, to work on safer, less expansion-prone batteries, and to look for a less volatile power storage system than lithium-ion. It's a tall order, I know.
Now, where do I store this scary OnePlus 9 Pro?