For the Game Boy Advance, yes. There was both a secretive internal Nintendo GBA emulation kit, and the public emulator development community had devkit games emulated before the system even officially launched.
I understand it was less practical to do this for say, the NES or SNES. But it should have been done for the GBA. It's not just important for future hardware to be able to easily emulate GBA games, it also protects against product refreshes breaking games, something that plagued quite a few classic Game Boy games as newer models came out and fixed bugs in the older models.
I understand it was less practical to do this for say, the NES or SNES. But it should have been done for the GBA. It's not just important for future hardware to be able to easily emulate GBA games, it also protects against product refreshes breaking games, something that plagued quite a few classic Game Boy games as newer models came out and fixed bugs in the older models.