Purple Cherry X Review: a new GameBoy Advance emulator for Windows Phone

The Windows Phone gaming emulation scene is dominated past a few prolific developers: Duc Le (who took over for M.k), Andre Botelho, and Samuel Blanchard. Samuel created two emulators in the early days of Windows Phone (Royal Cerise and Blue Tomato) before largely disappearing from the scene for a couple of years.

Loyal Windows Phone readers learned what Samuel had been up to when nosotros interviewed him last year. While busy with other commitments, he continued to plug abroad on a new GameBoy Advance emulator for Windows Phone eight. Today that emulator finally showed upwardly on the Store as Purple Cherry Ten. Although Majestic Cherry X lags behind competing emulator VBA8 in a few key areas, it also brings an entirely new perspective and features of its ain. Read on for our full review.

Main Bill of fare

The start matter you'll detect nigh Majestic Blood-red X is its striking visual design. At the top of the main carte du jour, you'll see an system of screenshots from the three about recently played games. Links to Import games, the app's Store, and Settings sit below the recent games. Swipe to the right for the full games list.

Instead of a solid colour for the background, the menu system uses colorful imagery from Yoshi'south Island (a Super NES and GameBoy Advance game). The background actually has multiple layers to it, which truly goes above and beyond what we expect from a mobile app's menus. And animated stars appear whenever y'all brand a option.

The VBA8 family of emulators has merely received a lovely visual overhaul, but Purple Cherry X notwithstanding outshines them (to say nix of the ugly UIs in the EmiPSX emulator family). Perchance not the portrait way graphics though. The original GameBoy-inspired "frame" looks unpolished and doesn't mesh well with a GameBoy Advance emulator. Then again, nobody plays emulators in portrait orientation anyway.

Game menu

Emulators typically come with a public domain game which users can play without having to import additional files. Imperial Reddish 10 includes two such games: Anguna: Warriors of Virtue (a top-downwardly action-RPG) and Maya (a lucifer-3 puzzle game). Surprisingly good for free games, especially Anguna. Both titles can fifty-fifty exist restored from ane of the menus if deleted.

The game card doesn't waste space with a giant title like some other emulators. Simply information technology does have letters that you can press to bring up the alphabet menu and jump to ROMs starting with specific letters. These take upward a lot of infinite and it'd be nice if we could toggle them.

My only other complaint is that games are represented by a generic GameBoy Accelerate icon rather than private screenshots. Yous tin view a screenshot within each game'south submenu, but not from the game selection screen itself. Hopefully the developer will add together screenshot browsing in a future update.

Importing games

Purple Cherry 10 offers 3 chief methods of importing ROMs (games). Games must employ either .GBA or .ZIP file extensions.

• Quick Download: To unlock this unique characteristic, users must brand an In-App Purchase of 99 cents (or $1.49 if you desire to get rid of ads as well). Having washed so, you can search for ROMs straight within the app. Users can then download ROMs directly from the search results. Information technology's very convenient, simply totally non legal.
• OneDrive: Formerly known as SkyDrive, this is the most common method of installing ROMs in Windows Phone emulators. At press time, Purple Cherry X's OneDrive integration is half broken. It only sees .ZIP files and not .GBA files. The programmer has already stock-still the issue and submitted a new build, then this won't be a problem for long.
• File Extension: Import games via e-mail attachment or spider web browser.

Settings

Regal Cherry X is light on settings at launch, but I wouldn't exist surprised if they go fleshed out more in the futurity. The standard operation options like toggling sound or enabling frame skip are all present. You tin lock the screen into Portrait or Mural mode, and fifty-fifty enable an accelerated Turbo mode when the Camera button is pressed.

Controls are where the emulator actually falls brusk at nowadays. The controls carte du jour is referred to every bit "Paddle," an wrong term resulting from language issues. The one unmarried command option is to accommodate on-screen command opacity for landscape mode. The app really needs the selection to reposition buttons, as well as toggle the "C" button with something more useful…

Controls

When in mural mode, yous'll detect the L and R buttons positioned at the heart edges of the screen – kind of unusual, simply certainly more attainable on large screens like the Lumia 1520'southward than putting them at the acme. At the top correct corner of the screen are the Select and Commencement buttons. Non a terrible position, but slightly hard to reach on the 1520.

The master activeness buttons B and A at the lesser-right corner. Just above them is the C push button, which I initially expected to office similar pressing both B and A at the same time. After a picayune research, I realized that C is the push button to toggle backlight on the GameBoy Advance SP... A completely useless function to emulate every bit far as I know, though perchance some odd game used it over the years. Just replacing C with a push for both A and B, or even a button to toggle autofire (another missing option) would be much better. Update: Samuel tells the states that C does perform A + B. Not sure why information technology didn't seem to do and so when I tested it.

Purple Cerise X does not support MOGA controllers at present. Luckily, Samuel does plan to add them in the near hereafter. Pairing the MOGA controller with a uniform emulator turns a Windows Phone into a true portable console, so the MOGA support will definitely be appreciated.

Actress features

Besides the lovely menus, Purple Scarlet X offers some cool features that some other emulators lack. Each game gets its own dedicated menu from which players can manage save states (user-created save files) and even suit settings specifically for that game (instead of universally).

Downwardly at the bottom, the game card tracks time played and how many times yous've played that game. Players tin can save the auto-created screenshot of the game and share it via email and social networks. You tin also pin the game to the Home screen, in which instance a cropped version of the screenshot acts as its live tile.

Overall Impression

Purple Cherry 10 is a great way to play classic GameBoy Accelerate games similar Zelda: the Minnish Cap and the Pokémon series. The games run pretty much perfectly on a Lumia 1520, and the on-screen controls part great every bit well.

There are notwithstanding some rough spots like the absence of screenshots during game browsing and the emulator's overall lack of control options. The language needs some proofreading also. But all of these things will probably amend over time. Every bit long as Samuel keeps improving the UI and adds MOGA controller support, Majestic Cherry X will provide VBA8 with some serious competition.

• Purple Ruddy X – Windows Telephone 8 – 5 MB – Free – Shop Link

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Source: https://www.windowscentral.com/purple-cherry-x-windows-phone-review

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