Gameboy/gameboy Color Emulator

[DaveC]

In the late days of the GP2X most of the main systems are being emulated very well. Recently a gaping hole in the GP2X emu library was PC-Engine but Exophase filled that nicely.

Now there is one system that I wish could be finished. That is GB/GBC. There is the GNUboy emu but it has some big flaws. For one thing you can not have more than a few ROMs on your card as if you do it crashes, this is the dealbreaker. Zip support is a bit rough. The menu is hard to use.

While it would be relatively easy to fix those things (the emulation itself is good) the source was lost.

My wish is to have a port of a GB/GBC emu that runs fullspeed no frameskip, with the ability to put ROMs in any directory and support zip files. We are not talking SNES here so it should be not to hard I wouldn't think.

 

[grahf]

Agreed. There are a ton of awesome gameboy games, and a handful of amazing gameboy color ones. GNUboy plays a lot of stuff decently, but the menu is really frustrating. Also it crashed with a few games, such as the first elevator sequence in Metal Gear Solid (Ghost Babel).

 

[abertalia]

I used to have a ton of Gameboy Color games. Alot of them sucked though and the only one I remember being really good was Metal Gear Solid.

 

[ledow]

A lot of gameboy emulators (including, I think, gnuboy) used gngb as their basis:

http://m.peponas.free.fr/gngb/

You can still download, compile this and it works for most roms (i have about twenty or thirty and didn't see problems), with SRAM saving and other bits.

It's not polished - it's basically a command-line program that uses SDL to draw fullscreen (the X etc. options are easily disabled). This would probably be the starting point for any gameboy emulator because most of the hard work is done. I did some tests a few weeks ago and if I remember, it compiles for GP2X without problems but sometimes you get the dreaded SDL Parachute but the fact is that it would probably be quite easy to get working properly and then it's just a matter of slapping an interface on the thing. I'd rate it as "slightly tricky" but that's about it, so anybody who can write games for the GP2X in C should have no problems getting it to work properly and adding a menu to it.

The fact that it hasn't already been done is probably due to GnuBoy2x's existence (most people don't care about having the source but GnuBoy2x looks and feels horrible to me - it takes me about a minute to get out of the bloody program each time) and the GB is getting on it a bit. That said, I was a big Gameboy fan and even owned a few things like the Super Nintendo Gameboy adaptor etc. I love Motocross Maniacs, Mario Land 2, Fortress of Fear and some of the more-obscure games.

If someone was looking for an emulation-project, this is quite a good one that you don't need to know *much* about emulators to do. The code is all there, it's just a question of conversion to the GP2X.

 

[dabridge]

I know it probably won't get done, but a build-in gameshark would be awesome. The only reason I want to use a gameshark is for the Pokemon series, man, I want to break those and get glitched pokemon.

Agreed with the new GBC emulator idea. If I knew how to code, I would give it a shot, but all I know is PHP.