Emerald is well regarded as the best of Generation 3, which is the final of the traditional 2D games and can trade with Fire Red/Leaf Green (remakes of the classic)

So you have available all of the original Pokémon

Ah good point. I was looking into buying a used copy of Fire Red / Leaf Green and they were surprisingly expensive.

I have a copy of red, but even with a new battery the save function keeps failing. I suspect I didn't seat the battery well and I need to solder it, but I am not trained in that and reluctant to have my first project involve an expensive retro cart.

Try https://afterplay.io it’s cross platform, saves every 20 seconds and keeps your last 50 saves which you can recover from if anything goes wrong

Thanks, this looks akin to what I'm looking for. Maybe a few features I don't need but looks interesting.

I chose Pokemon Emerald because it is my favorite of the games that have been disassembled!

has RBY been disassembled, out of curiosity?

Maybe the internal battery died. I honestly recommend you look at GBC style handhelds or if you like the GBA style, Anbernic made one that looks insanely close to a GBA.

There also a craze of DS style emulators popping up. They all give you comfort knowing that your saves will be fine forever if you back them up, even if the device dies.

Yeah to be clear, I replaced the internal battery. I don't know if the issue is that it isn't seated properly, it was working for a spell. But I can't solder and don't want my first project to be a 1st gen copy of Pokemon.

Anyways, I just want a "known good" emulator for the game boy. It could be a GBA emulator since that's backwards compatible, but I just want something simple to play Pokémon.

To be clear I was weirded out because an emulated copy glitched out, not the physical one. Physical one just had a battery issue.

mGBA is not bad, runs on any OS. There's also one for Mac, but I forget the name.

thank you for the suggestion. i value open source over MacOS compatibility, I can spin up a VM if needed.