Ladies, gentlemen and robots, I present software patents.
http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-...s1=Nintendo.AS.&OS=AN/Nintendo&RS=AN/Nintendo seems to be the one people are looking at.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2014/0349751.html is probably a better link to it.
Looks like another patent I can shoot down, though how Nintendo's own GB player (screens were available unofficially and supposedly an official version was on the books) or
http://www.siliconera.com/2008/01/07/the-gba-lives-inside-car-headrests/ (an official/licensed device) did not count as every type of prior art I do not know (they seem to be going for more accurate, possibly even cycle accurate, emulation rather than straight up hardware, a novel approach in this day and age when everybody is building a chip for something). Filing date on this patent was "23rd of June, 2014" by the way, though some related patents appear as early as 2000 (not sure if they managed to avoid being tripped up via their own prior art-- if memory serves in the US you can avoid that if you file within two years of your existing one being filed or something).
The interesting claim (and apparently the only one still standing) is
"17. A method of adapting an emulator, the method comprising: executing, on a processor, an emulator capable of running a plurality different binary applications; recognizing, by the processor, an identity of a binary application based on an inspection of the binary application; automatically adapting, by the processor, a behavior of the emulator to the binary application based on the recognized identity of the binary application; and generating, by the processor, an audio visual presentation using the adapted behavior of the emulator. "
Now I am not sure if this is some kind of encoding detection on steroids (and if not completely obvious to any remotely knowledgeable person in the field then compiler design of the late 80's probably has prior art in spades), Nintendo trying to patent dynamic recompilation or them trying a fancy method in which everybody else in the world would just use a header* and tying one of those three into what everybody else would recognise as a dynamically linked library is possibly up for debate.
*header stuff
http://problemkaputt.de/pandocs.htm#thecartridgeheader
http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#gbacartridgeheader
That would be the header types of the GB, GBC and GBA. As everything they would throw at it should be a legit ROM it will have a header value*, I reckon there might be a one if check method of doing it but five if checks would be more than enough to tell everything you want to know about it, and probably come as part of your emulator anyway.
*maybe not multiboot and there is official multiboot code so I might get to tone it down a notch.
Either way the patent introduction as sales patch for a device/company is one I have not seen the most of. That amused me. I can only hope if/when it comes to court they are not able to pull the proverbial wool over the eyes of a judge and say "all these emulators are inaccurate, look how many of them there are".