10 years ago today, my friend Paul Thorsen and I released GBA4iOS as seniors in high school. I'll never forget that day, or the many hours we spent together after school building it 💜

To celebrate, I’m excited to announce I’ve revived GBA4iOS for the new era of computing: meet GBA4vOS, the premier Game Boy Advance emulator for visionOS 🥽

With GBA4vOS you can not only relive your favorite Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games, but literally place them wherever you’d like in the world!

Whether it’s floating above your kitchen pot or an IMAX display on the moon, there’s never been a better way to game (boy) 🎮

That's just the beginning though — if you’ve seen my recent experiments with Vision Pro, those features are included too!

Starting with what Threads called “the worst feature imaginable” and “my arms hurt just watching it,” you can *finally* play Game Boy games without feeling a thing!

And for maximum stupidity, blow the game up to literal life-size so you can press buttons with your palm like God intended ✋

Then there’s my personal favorite feature: playing WarioWare: Twisted by just rotating your hands! Words can’t do this feature justice — you’ll have to try it out yourself 😉

Who knew the Vision Pro made such a good Kinect?

The countdown on the GBA4iOS website will end in about an hour, and once it does I’ll update the homepage with a link to join the GBA4vOS TestFlight. It’ll be open to everyone on a first-come, first-serve basis, so make sure you’re ready! http://gba4iosapp.com

And for those without a Vision Pro, don’t worry: there’s one more thing…

GBA4iOS

GBA4iOS — the one and only — is back from the dead in all its 2014 glory! And this time with a cool new name: GBA4iOS X (pronounced “GBA4iOS Roman Numeral Ex”)

GBA4iOS X includes all your favorite features like custom controller skins and full iPad support, and has been recompiled + updated to make it fully compatible with iOS 17!

Download it soon from http://www.gba4iosapp.com/download/

GBA4iOS

Why use GBA4iOS instead of Delta? Besides nostalgia, GBA4iOS X also brings back probably my favorite feature I’ve ever built: Event Distribution!

This feature *literally* inserts me into your Pokémon game so I can give your character a rare Pokemon. I hope to bring this back to Delta some day, but for now I’ve re-rereleased the original “Shiny Treecko” event for Pokemon Emerald, with more to come soon :)

Last but not least, it wouldn’t be a commemorative announcement without my first blog post in 3 years 🎉

I’m always asked why I still go through the trouble of making iOS emulators, so I tried something new and wrote this from a 2nd person perspective! Hope it helps y’all understand why I became obsessed with all this in the first place :) https://rileytestut.com/blog/2024/02/19/happy-10-birthday-gba4ios/

Happy 10th Birthday GBA4iOS!

10 years ago today, I released GBA4iOS — a passion project my friend Paul Thorsen and I built during our senior year of high school. I’ve reflected many times over the impact GBA4iOS had on my life (many, many, times), but for the 10th anniversary I wanted to try something different.

Riley Testut
@rileytestut This post is amazing 🤩. Read it like 3 times.
@TheiPhone_Dev thank you!! Means a lot, put a lot of thought into it :)
@rileytestut As an high school student this is really inspiring. Thank you for this post.😁
@TheiPhone_Dev hell yeah, go out and build some cool things!! Where there’s a will there’s a way :)
@rileytestut congratulations Riley on the relaunch of GBA4iOS! It’s incredible, the passion of this project shines through 🤩
@whatthecj thank you!! Glad people are enjoying it ☺️
@rileytestut Phew, I was nervous it wasn’t going to be redesigned for iOS 7!
@ioslife that website is such a time capsule 😂
@rileytestut apple approved a TestFlight version?? Was that a mistake? Do you think Apple will reject it in the future?
@rileytestut WarioWare: Twisted! is such a gem. “WarioWare: Mega Microgames!” was released only a year and a half prior, but rather than just repacking the same game with accelerometer support, they redeveloped everything from the ground up.
@dlevi I loved the original too! But yeah Twisted is just *so* unique and well made, one of my fave games of all time