GBmulator

A Game Boy Color and emulator with fast Link Cable and IR sensor support over TCP.

You can compile and run it on your linux machine or use it in your browser here (Note: the browser version does not have link cable support).

Game Boy Advance is also in early development: only some test roms can run.

Screenshots

Features

• GameBoy and GameBoy Color emulator
• PPU implements FIFO rendering
• Audio with dynamic rate control
• Fast TCP Link Cable and IR sensor
• Support for MBC1, MBC1M, MBC2, MBC3, MBC30, MBC5, MBC7 and HuC1 cartridges
• Battery saves and savestates
• Game Boy Printer
• Game Boy Camera
• Supports keyboard and gamepad controllers

Installation

Various dependencies are needed to build the desktop app:

• libadwaita
• libmanette
• opengl
• openal
• zlib (compressed savestates)
• gstreamer (camera input for Game Boy Camera)

In addition to these dependencies, the following tools are needed to build the desktop app:

• make
• gcc
• rgbds
• imagemagick

Installation process

# 1. Clone this repository
git clone https://github.com/mpostaire/gbmulator.git
# 2. cd into the cloned repository
cd gbmulator
# 3. Compile gbmulator
make
# 4. Install gbmulator
sudo make install
# To uninstall gbmulator, run the following command
sudo make uninstall

Usage

After installation, GBmulator should be available from the app launcher of your desktop environment. You can also call it from the command line with the (optional) path of a rom as the first argument.

gbmulator path/to/rom.gb

Key bindings

The following table show the default keybindings (they can be changed in GBmulator's menus except those marked with a '*').

Action	Key
UP	Up
DOWN	Down
LEFT	Left
RIGHT	Right
A	Numpad 0
B	Numpad period
START	Numpad 1
SELECT	Numpad 2
*Load savesate 1 → 8	F1 → F8
*Create savesate 1 → 8	Shift + F1 → F8

There is also support for gamepad controllers.

TODO

• Find out what are the accurate timings for the GB/GBC ppu pixel FIFO/fetcher (especially for corner cases)
• Early WIP GBA
• rewrite android port without SDL, also current android project doesn't build anymore

Resources used

GB/GBC:

• https://gbdev.io/pandocs/
• http://marc.rawer.de/Gameboy/Docs/GBCPUman.pdf
• https://gekkio.fi/files/gb-docs/gbctr.pdf
• https://izik1.github.io/gbops/
• https://gbdev.gg8.se/wiki/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyzD8pNlpwI
• https://github.com/AntonioND/giibiiadvance/blob/master/docs/TCAGBD.pdf
• https://pixelbits.16-b.it/GBEDG/ppu/
• https://shonumi.github.io/articles/art2.html

GBA:

• https://emudev.org/system_resources
• https://mgba.io/2015/06/27/cycle-counting-prefetch/
• https://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#armcpureference
• https://github.com/nba-emu/NanoBoyAdvance/blob/master/src/nba/src/arm/handlers/arithmetic.inl#L84
• https://vision.gel.ulaval.ca/~jflalonde/cours/1001/h17/docs/arm-instructionset.pdf
• https://github.com/Normmatt/gba_bios/blob/master/asm/bios.s