Do Pokémon Gold/Silver/Crystal Work With the EverDrive GBA Mini?

Short Answer

It does! 🎉However there are two caveats:

1. You need to do a little work to get the RTC running
2. Saving has an extra step

Long Answer

I'm using:

• EVERDRIVE GBA MINI
• Running GBAOS-v1.16 of the firmware
• jagoombacolor. The base version works just fine with RTC on EverDrive

Emulator

The EverDrive GBA Mini doesn't natively run GameBoy and GameBoy Color games. To run them, it requires an emulator. I'm using jagoombacolor as it supports RTC where Goomba Colour doesn't.

There are a couple of steps to get the RTC to work with jagoombacolor and the EverDrive and a big thanks to u/madmangohan for their writeup, but in short:

1. Use jagoombacolor
2. Enable RTC in the EverDrive menu for the jagoombacolor gbc.gba file. I also copied the same file and named it gb.gba to handle GB games too, and enabled RTC for that file as well.

Then after saving your progress in game, ensure you hit L + R to bring up the jagoombacolor menu which properly writes the save.

Real Time Clock

Below is a quick time-lapse of ~15 minutes showing the real time clock working as expected in Pokémon Silver after the setup:

As you can see, the GBA Mini is removed for the ~15 minutes but still keeps up with the current time when we check it afterwards.

Screen Size

This one is for the Analogue Pocket users mostly, though it might apply elsewhere. The Pocket does full screen GB and GBC games and uses most of the screen for GBA games because of the difference in aspect ratio. However this means that GB/GBC games emulated in GBA will have an even smaller display.