The Supervision was the cheap answer to the Game Boy: a 1992 handheld from Watara with a bigger screen, a lower price and almost no games you had heard of. It is easy to emulate, and it needs no BIOS.
We have 66 Supervision games on My Abandonware, which is very nearly the whole library, Crystball — the game sold in the box — included.
Emulators
Potator is the one to use, as a core in RetroArch. Wataroo is the choice on Windows if you would rather have a window of your own.
- Potator: a core for RetroArch, on every system. It plays the whole library, colours the picture and softens the screen. Recommended.
- Wataroo (Windows): a small emulator with menus, written by Osman Celimli. Accurate, and it runs on almost anything.
- MAME knows the machine as
svision. It works, but its sound is behind the others: Classic Casino and its recorded speech come out wrong.
Running the games
Open the game and play. Our files are .sv inside a zip, 9 to 156 KB, and there is no BIOS to find and no setting to change first.
The handheld had four shades of grey on a 160 by 160 screen, so a game asks nothing of your machine. Every emulator above takes the file as it comes out of the zip.
Our 66 games are almost the whole catalogue of the console, and the names tell you what kind of catalogue it was: Hash Blocks, Jaguar Bomber, Pacboy & Mouse, Super Pang. Most are unlicensed copies of something else, which is the charm of the machine.
Colours and the blurry screen
The real screen was grey and smeared. The Potator core can paint the picture in any of thirty palettes, and copy the trailing of the old display on purpose.
Open the core options in RetroArch and look for Internal Palette. Greyscale is what the handheld showed; green, amber and the Game Boy palettes are there too. One of them is called TV-Link, after the accessory that put a Supervision on a television in four colours — those are its colours, not the accessory itself, which no emulator has ever run.
LCD Ghosting in the same menu lets the picture trail behind the action, as the real screen did. It is off by default, and moving games are easier to follow with it left off.
The Magnum game
One game does not run everywhere. Journey to the West was written for the Magnum, the late revision of the console, and only two emulators know that machine.
Potator and Wataroo both run it. MAME does not. If the game starts and then shows nothing, you are on an emulator that only knows the first Supervision.
I need help!
We do not provide support for running abandonware games. The Supervision has almost no community, and one page holds most of what is known.
The Emulation General Wiki compares every emulator of the machine and follows the work on the TV-Link.
Checked in October 2026 against each emulator's own documentation and, where it exists, its source code. Game counts and file sizes come from our own catalogue. These guides were drafted with the help of an AI assistant and checked by hand before publishing. If something here is out of date, tell us.