Building a Game Boy Emulator with Rust

Re:Building a Game Boy Emulator with Rust by Macha on Thursday April 29, 2021 @02:55PM (#26985016)

Depends on your area of interest. How to build a game boy emulator is pretty well trodden as it's usually used as the beginner's guide to emulation.

Here's a step by step guide in JS, for example: http://imrannazar.com/GameBoy-Emulation-in-JavaScript:-The-C...

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Re:Building a Game Boy Emulator with Rust by plandis on Thursday April 29, 2021 @03:38PM (#26985650)

I would honestly recommend not trying to emulate the gameboy if you’re doing emulation for the first time. I did this and it didn’t go very well (but perhaps I’m a below average person)

Chip8 or the NES (6502+PPU) are probably better places to start for beginners.

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Re:Building a Game Boy Emulator with Rust by jdmoreira on Thursday April 29, 2021 @05:06PM (#26986696)

Isn't the PPU very hard? Especially the fact that both the 6502 and the PPU execute in parallel?

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Re:Building a Game Boy Emulator with Rust by plandis on Thursday April 29, 2021 @06:06PM (#26987416)

The PPU is definitely complex but the NES has the benefit of being much, much, much better documented than the GB which is honestly a huge advantage.

The NES also has a bunch of complex cartridge mappers but you don’t necessarily need to implement the most complex ones like MMC5.

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Re:Building a Game Boy Emulator with Rust by arcticbull on Thursday April 29, 2021 @04:13PM (#26986120)

I've been writing a GameBoy emulator in Rust too haha, though as I've written one before, I'm looking at this more in the context of a static recompilation exercise. Building a GameBoy on an FPGA has been another ongoing pet project.

The canonical reference for anyone building a GameBoy emulator are the Pan Docs [1, 2] -- originally written by Pan, then maintained by Martin Korth of NO$GMB.

[1] https://gbdev.io/pandocs/

[2] https://github.com/gbdev/pandocs

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