Gearboy

Copyright © 2012 by Ignacio Sanchez

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Gearboy is a Nintendo Game Boy / GameBoy Color emulator written in C++ that runs on iOS, Raspberry Pi, Mac, Windows and Linux.

The main focus of this emulator is readability of source code with a high compatibility.

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Downloads

• Gearboy 1.3 for Jailbroken iOS: Cydia. You can open rom files from other apps like Safari or Dropbox.
• Gearboy 1.3 for Non-Jailbroken iOS: Use your developer certificate to compile and install it, then you can open rom files from other apps or use iTunes file sharing.
• Gearboy 0.8 for Windows: Gearboy-0.8-Windows.zip
• Gearboy 0.8 for Linux: Gearboy-0.8-Linux.tar.gz

Features

• Accurate CPU emulation, passes cpu_instrs.gb from blargg's tests.
• Accurate instruction timing, passes instr_timing.gb from blargg's tests.
• Memory Bank Controllers (MBC1, MBC2, MBC3 with RTC, MBC5), ROM + RAM and multicart cartridges.
• Accurate LCD controller emulation. Background, window and sprites, with correct timings and priorities.
• Mix frames: Mimics the LCD ghosting effect seen in the original Game Boy.
• Sound emulation using SDL Audio and Gb_Snd_Emu library.
• Game Boy Color support.
• Integrated disassembler. It can dump the full disassembled memory to a text file or access it in real time.
• Saves battery powered RAM cartridges to file.
• Compressed rom support (ZIP deflate).
• Multi platform. Runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Raspberry Pi and iOS.

Todo List

• Saving and loading game states (only desktop).
• Pixel precision scan line timing (https://gist.github.com/3730564).
• Debugger.

Compiling Instructions

The best way of compiling Gearboy is by using one of the IDE projects provided for each platform.

For all desktop platforms you will need SDL and Qt 4 SDKs installed and configured. SDL is provided as a framework for iOS.

There is a nice Netbeans + Qt tutorial here.

iOS

• Install Xcode for Mac OS X. You need iOS SDK 5.1 or later.
• Open the Gearboy Xcode project and build.
• Run it on real hardware using your iOS developer certificate. For jailbroken devices use the jailbreak branch.

Raspberry Pi - Raspbian

• Install SDL development dependencies (sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev).
• Use make to build the project.

Windows

• You need Visual Studio 2010 (Express Edition will do but you won't be able to install the Qt Add-in).
• Install the Qt 4 SDK for Windows.
• Install the Qt 4 Visual Studio Add-in and point it to the Qt SDK.
• Install and configure SDL for development.
• In order to use OpenGL extensions I used GLEW. This is because of a bug in QGLFunctions. Make sure the GLEW headers and libs are configured within VC++.
• Open the Gearboy Visual Studio project and build.

Mac OS X

• You need Netbeans 7.3 or later.
• Install Xcode for the compiler to be available on the command line.
• Install the Qt 4 SDK for Mac OS.
• Add qmake to the PATH (You can find qmake in the bin directory where you have Qt SDK installed).
• Install and configure SDL for development.
• Open the Gearboy Netbeans project and build. The project will use clang.
• Alternatively, you can use make -f nbproject/Makefile-Release.mk SUBPROJECTS= .build-conf to build the project.

Linux

• You need Netbeans 7.3 or later.
• Install Qt development dependencies (Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install qt4-dev-tools).
• Install OpenGL development dependencies (Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install freeglut3-dev).
• Install SDL development dependencies (Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev).
• In order to use OpenGL extensions I used GLEW dependencies (Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install libglew1.6-dev). This is because of a bug in QGLFunctions.
• Open the Gearboy Netbeans project and build.
• Alternatively you can use make -f nbproject/Makefile-Release.mk SUBPROJECTS= .build-conf to build the project.
• In Ubuntu 12.04 I had to export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=ALSA before running the emulator for the sound to work properly.

Accuracy Tests

Compared to other emulators: see here.

Tests from blargg's test roms:

Screenshots

License

Gearboy - Nintendo Game Boy Emulator

Copyright (C) 2012 Ignacio Sanchez

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/