Writing my first Gameboy Emulator

Re:Writing my first Gameboy Emulator by fwsgonzo on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @02:41PM (#25585170)

It's super interesting to write your first emulator. I wrote a GBC emulator too once, and I wrote down all the problems I encountered that weren't easy to solve:

https://github.com/fwsGonzo/gamebro/blob/master/POSTERITY.md

Many of the issues are not documented anywhere, and it is just about guessing what the hardware did - and thus, what the developers back in the day relied on!

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Re:Writing my first Gameboy Emulator by spencercw on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @04:29PM (#25586340)

Nice idea to write that stuff down. Something that flummoxed me for a while was how Pokemon Yellow does the Pikachu sound, since the Game Boy doesn't really support sample-based audio. Turns out it does something akin to spending 100% of its CPU time turning the sound on and off to play the samples.

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Re:Writing my first Gameboy Emulator by zeta0134 on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @05:50PM (#25587204)

For anyone who might be curious as to how this worked in practice, Retro Game Mechanics does an excellent breakdown of the technique used here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fooSxCuWvZ4

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Re:Writing my first Gameboy Emulator by RupertWiser on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @02:44PM (#25585193)

What a wonderful resource! Thanks for documenting this. I should probably follow your example and do the same.

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Re:Writing my first Gameboy Emulator by eyx on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @05:57PM (#25587275)

Really interesting.

How long did it take to have a working emulator ?

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Re:Writing my first Gameboy Emulator by fwsgonzo on Thursday December 31, 2020 @02:47PM (#25596342)

Maybe a full month to get GameBoy ROMs up, if I remember correctly. It did take a while, as there's always room for misunderstanding how something is supposed to work!

But super worth it!

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