The WonderSwan (1999) was Bandai's handheld, designed by Gunpei Yokoi, the man behind the Game Boy, after he left Nintendo. It ran for weeks on one battery, it was sold in Japan only, and a colour version followed in 2000.
We have about 70 WonderSwan games and about 50 WonderSwan Color games on My Abandonware, including Final Fantasy and Wizardry games made just for the handheld.
Emulators
WonderSwan emulation is easy: no BIOS, no setup. Mednafen runs both handhelds, and its Beetle Cygne core does the same inside RetroArch.
- Beetle Cygne: a core for RetroArch, on every system. It comes from Mednafen, itself built on Cygne, the first WonderSwan emulator.
- Mednafen (Windows, Linux) runs them on its own, from the command line.
- ares (Windows, Mac, Linux) is a good second opinion, with its own window and menus.
Our games are small files, .ws for the WonderSwan and .wsc for the Color, most from 100 KB to 3 MB. Open one and play: nothing else is needed.
Vertical games and the two direction pads
The WonderSwan had two sets of direction buttons, X and Y, so a game could be played held flat or turned sideways. Many games are vertical: the picture looks wrong until you turn it.
Rotate the picture in your emulator when a game starts sideways, and remember that the game may then answer the other set of buttons. In RetroArch, the Beetle Cygne core maps the X buttons to the direction pad and the Y buttons to the shoulder buttons of your gamepad, so both are always at hand.
If a game seems not to answer at all, it is probably reading the set you are not pressing.
Japanese games and fan translations
The WonderSwan never left Japan, so nearly every game is in Japanese. Fans translated a number of them, and we hold those versions beside the originals.
Look at the file description on our game pages: a file marked "Translated en" is an English version made by fans. We have about 18 of them, including Final Fantasy II, Wizardry and Mr. Driller. Some other files say "Fixed EEPROM", which means the save memory of the cartridge was repaired so the game saves properly in an emulator.
I need help!
We do not provide support for running abandonware games. The WonderSwan is a small scene, mostly around translations.
The Emulation General Wiki compares the emulators, and the Mednafen documentation lists the settings of the handheld, the rotation included.
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.