Porting Gnuboy Using Sdl


clach04

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Jul 10, 2010
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There are a few different ports of gnuboy around the place, I've spent a long time collecting the original gnuboy code putting it into SCM and updating it.

The project is at http://code.google.com/p/gnuboy/.

If you want to build on your platform and you have SDL available it should be a fairly quick and easy job.

I managed to get the generic cross platform code for gnuboy to compile for the Dingoo at full speed :) This is the same code that is used to build on the desktop for Linux and Windows, this makes testing and development easier.

Right now this means that there is no GUI, you have to start gnuboy with the rom as a parameter, if you have some sort of launcher like GMenu (or I guess the Pickle launcher I've read about) this limitation may not be such a big deal.

I've also recently taken on Oh Boy (which is based on gnuboy), Oh Boy is pretty nice BUT it does not (yet) make use of the SDL port of gnuboy, Oh Boy is an entirely different SDL port. Whilst I've started work on Oh Boy to keep it alive, I'm sort of hoping to kill it off too..... by moving it into gnuboy. This won't happen over night as some minor re-architecting will be required.

The whole point though is a single code base, for multiple platforms which hopefully fits in to the ethos of this new forum :)

If you are a developer please check it out, even if you have no interest in gameboys, the menu system library that Oh Boy provides is written in C and SDL and is pretty small, it looks like it could be the basis of a menu system for other emulators or games.

Just to make clear, I did not write the original gnuboy or Oh Boy. I worked on gnuboy for the Pocket PC a few years back, I'm simply trying to keep them maintained and portable.

Whilst I would love a Pandora/Caanoo/etc. I have an x86 desktop and a DIngoo A320 so those are the platforms I'm building on but I'd like to have support for other platforms. Evil Dragon has been working with me to get the Pandora port out there, again all using the same source. I have the start of build notes at http://code.google.com/p/gnuboy/wiki/BuildNotes it could do with filling out, if you have experience with autoconf and cross compiling, I'd love to get some notes for that filled in.

For Oh Boy see http://code.google.com/p/ohboy/wiki/BuildRequirements

The other gnuboy related port is Lemonboy, I've only glanced over the code so I've not yet really looked at it in detail. There maybe some useful code in there too.


Chris
 
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