The mGBA emulator is available on multiple platforms. Again, while we can’t recommend any particular sites, there are websites that will emulate GBA games within your web browser, so you won’t need to find or download any of these games yourself. If you’re unwilling to take the risk, you can also consider playing GBA games online. You should also double-check the piracy laws for your country before you proceed. If you decide to download GBA ROMs online, check the files thoroughly for any potential malware infection before opening them. Several online sites do exist that offer GBA ROMs (as the game files are called) for download, but you’ll have to find these yourself. “Over half the films made before 1950 are gone,” he said.With that in mind, it isn’t possible for us to provide information on where you can find your own Game Boy Advance games for download. Cifaldi gave a talk at the 2016 Game Developers Conference about emulation, arguing that emulation was the best way to republish old games so that they’d avoid the fate of early films. (What happens to the games, for example, that only lived on floppy discs?) There are organizations like The Videogame History Foundation, led by the archivist Frank Cifaldi, that attempt to catalog and save as much as possible from gaming’s earliest days.

The problem of digital preservation is looming: corporations don’t always save the original source code or assets to games, and, more broadly, there is the matter of formats.

If you believe that art and culture are worth saving protecting for future generations to experience, then games preservation is incredibly important. You can find things online that you can’t buy anywhere else. Copies of games that are out of print, for one reason or another, circulate on ROM sites. Game emulation is a form of preservation.

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