In most cases, it’s not new for a group of third-party developers to release old game emulators for the Switch. But at this new leak, experts have interesting comments. Talking to Ars Technica, experts said that the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance emulator software could be official products developed by Nintendo itself.
According to experts, the two emulators appear to be developed by Nintendo’s European Branch Research and Development Department (NERD for short). The leaked information makes many people expect that Nintendo will officially support the classic games of the past.
Image of GBA emulator running on Nintendo Switch.
Leaked content includes what?
The two emulators were given two codenames, “Hiroko” for the Game Boy and “Sloop” for the Game Boy Advance. This information was extracted by 4chan users from the NSP file, in addition to some encrypted NCA files.
Also in the thread discussing the above files, the first posting account identified these emulators “Officially developed by the in-house team, are Game Boy Color/Advance emulators for the Nintendo Switch Online service, they have never been published anywhere.“.
File NSPwhich stands for “Nintendo Submission Package”, is a compressed file containing content, which can be read by the Nintendo Switch or other Switch emulator software.
File NCA (short for “Nintendo Content Archive”, which is game data taken from the Nintendo Switch game card.
Experts believe that this is an old version of the SDK (software development kit).
The NERD team has developed software for the NES Classic and SNES Classic, and are also the programmers who built the GameCube emulator technology announced last year. The fact that NERD participates in the Game Boy project is not surprising.
Nor can this be considered as solid evidence that Nintendo is developing Game Boy emulator software, when a third party pretended to leak information from “uncle Nintendo”, to promote fake software. set up his own.
As expected, Nintendo declined to comment. However, an informed source providing data for Ars Technica confirmed that 99.9% of the emulator software is real, this person himself “completely convinced” that the above software is being developed by Nintendo.
List of games being tested.
Assuming the leaks are true, it’s still unclear when Nintendo will announce the project. The Game Boy emulator version is still rudimentary, it is unclear how far the project has progressed during the unknown period.
Currently, Nintendo has been operating Nintendo Switch Online, a service that offers more than 100 classic NES and SNES titles. It’s not hard to imagine a Game Boy Color/Advance emulator system running on the Nintendo Switch, further expanding Nintendo’s library of classic games.