Decent Gameboy Emulator Yet?

[dogeymon]

I've always got a soft spot for original Gameboy and Gameboy Color roms. The only emulator I've found so far is lemonboy and it's got problems. It doesn't do fullscreen properly, it's a bit slow and choppy, and the color is a bit messed up.


Has anyone seen any other emulator on Wiz for GB/GBC yet other than lemonboy?

 

[Sitizen]

Lemonboy is the way to go, I don't know any other emulator. Color isn't messed up, you can choose the palette in the options menu. Doing fullscreen "properly" is impossible, resolution is too different. Some performance tweaks would be nice though.

 

[b1ueskycomp1ex]

Lemonboy is the way to go, I don't know any other emulator. Color isn't messed up, you can choose the palette in the options menu. Doing fullscreen "properly" is impossible, resolution is too different. Some performance tweaks would be nice though.

Let's face it, the way it is now (No offense >.<) It's a coding disaster. Whether this has to do with timings or code for sound or what, I don't know. doing something like the GPSP scaling, fixing up the interface, and fixing the sound issues is probably not going to happen in the near future. Which is sad, because the original gameboy had a few good games (pokemon..... >.> And pokemon. And metal gear solid for the game boy advance! =D)

 

[Pickle]

Lemonboy is the way to go, I don't know any other emulator. Color isn't messed up, you can choose the palette in the options menu. Doing fullscreen "properly" is impossible, resolution is too different. Some performance tweaks would be nice though.

Let's face it, the way it is now (No offense >.<) It's a coding disaster. Whether this has to do with timings or code for sound or what, I don't know. doing something like the GPSP scaling, fixing up the interface, and fixing the sound issues is probably not going to happen in the near future. Which is sad, because the original gameboy had a few good games (pokemon..... >.> And pokemon. And metal gear solid for the game boy advance! =D)

Im pretty sure the last time I tried the scaling did work with color roms too. In my opinion the only thing with lemonboy that isnt great is the sound, ive spent a good amount of time trying to get it working perfect for everything.
I also dont like the vsync option, but it works and will suffice until I can learn to use the hw counters for timings.

There are also other gb/c emulators I ported gngb, vba (perfect sound, but slow), but both are native gb/c resolution do if scaling is your thing then lemonboy is one to use.

 

[renejr902]

im dissapointed, because the speed is too slow to be playable.

i tried several games with x2 scale mode and cant get more than 52 fps. so all games i tried are slow and unplayable.

i played for 15 minutes at mario land 2 at 52 fps, after 15 minutes i feel so slow and sleepy, i drop my wiz on my bed and sleep for a hour. LOL

sorry i was just joking but 52 fps is too slow for me.

 

[Pickle]

im dissapointed, because the speed is too slow to be playable.

i tried several games with x2 scale mode and cant get more than 52 fps. so all games i tried are slow and unplayable.

i played for 15 minutes at mario land 2 at 52 fps, after 15 minutes i feel so slow and sleepy, i drop my wiz on my bed and sleep for a hour. LOL

sorry i was just joking but 52 fps is too slow for me.

i dont think you set the vsync number properly

 

[renejr902]

i dont find any VSYNC option, where is the option, please tell me. i dont find any vsync option in main menu. and no vsync option in option.

 

[renejr902]

ok i got the emu from your( your web site i suppose.) i found a link on another topic.

now i see the vsync option. But why the lemonboy version on the gp32x.de wiz download section is a different emulator. and WHY the sound is much better ?

 

[renejr902]

sorry to said that, but i prefer the wiz version i found on the gp32x.de wiz section.

the sound is so strange in your wiz version on your web site link, that i cant stop laugh, sorry dont take anything personal, it just very funny to heard sound effect and music in some games. LOL i cant live with the mario land 2 music in this version.

Good speed with funny music or slow games with normal music ???? i choose slow game with normal music. But to be honest i will not play with any of theses version, i will wait another release Pickle. i know coding is very hard, i did some coding in the past, i made a small game in pascal language.

thanks anyway for your emu.

note: it seems gbc color game have better sound quality

 

[EvilDragon]

I've always wondered how hard decent GB emulation is, but sound has always been a problem with early versions of emulators.

Scaling does work, however, in my opinion, one important scale is missing:
You can scale to fullscreen. That does either squeeze the games or cut off a bit on top and bottom.
The option I'd love to have is scale to height of screen WITHOUT squeezing.
There'll be some black bars to the left and right, but I think that should look best

Biggest problem still is the sound though.
Out of interest: Why is it that hard? Did Nintendo rely THAT much on good timings? Or is it because it's purely beeper sound...?

The power should be there, Rlyehs GB was running perfect on the old GP32... what's different from the GP32 to the WIZ that makes the sound implementation that hard?

 

[derdritte]

Scaling does work, however, in my opinion, one important scale is missing:
You can scale to fullscreen. That does either squeeze the games or cut off a bit on top and bottom.
The option I'd love to have is scale to height of screen WITHOUT squeezing.
There'll be some black bars to the left and right, but I think that should look best

I am missing that option too. Since it seems to be possible hardware-wise,
I don't understand why this wasn't implemented. But playing at 1:1 aka original size is fine as well.
GBA-emulation really is perfect. Everything I wanted is supported.

Biggest problem still is the sound though.
Out of interest: Why is it that hard? Did Nintendo rely THAT much on good timings? Or is it because it's purely beeper sound...?

Sound seems good at my end. It might not be perfect, but the speed seems pretty synced and the quality is okay for the speakers at least.

so long,
derdritte

 

[renejr902]

im pretty sure the lemonboy version on gp32x.de has really better sound and music. compare mario land 2 in each version. Why is this ?

 

[DaveC]

im dissapointed, because the speed is too slow to be playable.

i tried several games with x2 scale mode and cant get more than 52 fps. so all games i tried are slow and unplayable.

i played for 15 minutes at mario land 2 at 52 fps, after 15 minutes i feel so slow and sleepy, i drop my wiz on my bed and sleep for a hour. LOL

sorry i was just joking but 52 fps is too slow for me.

i dont think you set the vsync number properly

It is sluggish for me too. While it may not be really that much slower it just doesn't "feel right". When you play it you can just sense that it is struggling it is hard to explain. The sound being off also adds to the slow feeling.

I guess GB emus were always hard to port for some reason. Not sure why but they weren't that smooth on the GP2X either, GP32 was the best (Rlyeh's emu).

 

[renejr902]

yeah gp32 gb emu was the best. like you said the gb emu never feel so smooth on the gp2x.

 

[juanvvc]

The problem with sound is that we are not experts on sound We are relying on the code of others and then suppose that that code works. In Lemonboy, the sound code comes from the SDL port (that is failing even on current PCs) and the Gp2x port (this code by K-teto in its own thread) Both solutions are not the best ones, but they are the only available without the help of a sound expert that will be very welcomed. Please...

Speed hacks should not be necessary on Wiz, definitely. It is a problem with timing until Pickle figures out a way to use the hardware clock, or the sound works fine enough to be used for synchronization (this is my current work, with no advance ). Stay tuned, folks

 

[Exophase]

If you want a different Gameboy audio core I can give you one. But that's more about data generation than output.

One of the ways in which my audio cores differ from how some other emulators do them is that the sound is generated by the main thread, not the audio thread. This gives much better timing accuracy potential and is essential when some of the audio hardware is just passing through raw samples generated somewhere else on the platform. But it means if you don't synchronize it right it'll start cracking.

You might want to think about abandoning SDL and using OSS directly since it's available on Wiz. This is pretty simple to do, by creating a thread that just pumps in audio data picked off from a circular buffer that the emulator writes to. These buffers have to be blocking, so that the audio thread waits for more data if it runs out and the main thread waits for the audio thread if it fills up. I do this using condition variables, which you can use in SDL or directly in pthreads. They're pretty easy to do.

This has the side effect of synchronizing the emulator to the right real time speed, although its granularity will depend on the audio buffer size. On Wiz I think I got 4096 byte buffers working (4 bytes per sample, 44.1KHz 16bit stereo), unlike the 2048 I got on GP2X and PSP. That's about 23.25ms latency, which is still pretty good.

I can give you code for this too, if you want.

 

[juanvvc]

I can give you code for this too, if you want.

Of course I do. Thank you very much.

 

[Exophase]

Okay, give me a while to prepare something.

 

[Husky.Gnoll]

I wish there was another emulator, Battle Arena Toshinden starts up just fine but the buttons don't work.

 

[devour]

I'm curious as to the status of this.
Is a new version of Lemonboy in the works? If so, could you do kind of like the Game Gear Emu and make a black background with the device's native resolution centered?
It would be much appreciated.