Writing a Game Boy emulator, Cinoop I've always wanted to write an emulator from scratch, but I've held off for a long time because it's probably the most advanced programming project I've ever wanted to do. Picking a system to emulate isn't an easy choice; the standard first emulator project seems to be a emulator. Reading about CHIP-8 definitely helped me to understand a lot of emulation concepts, but it seemed a bit too basic. I felt that I got enough out of just reading through other people's emulators, and that writing my own would be a pointless exercise. On the other hand, there's the NES and Game Boy; both of which seemed far too advanced for me! Eventually, I decided to write a minimalist Game Boy interpreting emulator, without support for custom mappers or sound, (and probably many inaccuracies). Autodmg instructions for mac os sierra 10.12.4. I called the project Cinoop.

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Cinoop is written in C and is. It can be run on Windows, DS, GameCube, 3DS, Linux based OSes, PSP, and PS4. Getting past the copyright screen Cinoop was getting stuck in a loop, and not progressing past the copyright screen.

After some brief debugging, I found that blocking any writes to the first byte of HRAM (0xff80) would allow the loop to be completed: void writeByte(unsigned short address, unsigned char value) { // Block writes to ff80 if(tetrisPatch && address == 0xff80) return; It wasn't my intention to use game specific patches rather than sorting out bugs properly, but I assumed that if I temporarily enabled this patch, the problem would eventually sort its self out as I improved Cinoop (which it did). After temporarily fixing the previous looping problem, I was presented with another; the game was repeating the following three instructions infinitely: ld a, 0xff80 and a jr z I realised that it was probably waiting for the value to be written to by an interrupt, so I dumped the interrupt enable register: 0x09, meaning that both VBlank and Serial interrupts were enabled ( (1.

Sprites The final major addition to the core would be sprite support, which wasn't too difficult to implement after having already implemented background maps. The Game Boy can display up to 40 sprites, with the properties of each stored in a basic OAM table, containing the position, tile number, palette number, flip, and priority. Randomisation Tetris relies on reading the divider register, at address 0xff04, as the source of entropy to determine which random block will be next. Usually this register is a timer which increments linearly until either overflown or reset to 0 (by writing any value to it). I decided to return rand when attempting to read from this value instead.

Since this register is only used as a random number generator for Tetris, this change will provide a better source of entropy, without any adverse effects for this game. When using rand, you should change the seed with srand (usually with the current time), otherwise, if you srand with the same seed, you will play the game with the exact same order of blocks. Porting To make Cinoop more useful, I decided to port it to several other systems. DS The first system I ported Cinoop to was the DS, which really didn't take long since I am so familiar with it.

I started by rendering to the DS in framebuffer mode, which can be done as follows. Download driver for insignia usb to mac. VideoSetMode(MODE_FB0); vramSetBankA(VRAM_A_LCD); VRAM_A[x + y * 256] = RGB15(red, green, blue); This was good at first because it meant that I could just reuse the Windows rendering code, so I managed to get Cinoop up and running fairly quickly: However, the DS already has support for tiles and sprites; rendering to a framebuffer is slow. I revised the code to use the DS' native tile rendering.

It ran faster than the framebuffer renderer, but it had some minor graphical glitches on some tiles (happened on real hardware as well as on emulators). 3DS 3DS development is a lot harder than DS development since it has had far less time to mature. There is far less documentation, and it feels clunky to develop for as a result of this. For example, the DS' libfat supports file reading using the standard C procedures ( fopen et al.), however the 3DS' ctrulib has its own special way to read files ( FSUSER_OpenFileDirectly et al.). The 3DS scene is very chaotic at the moment; there are multiple launchers which you should support when releasing something: • 3ds - Flashcards • 3dsx and smdh - Homebrew Launcher • cia - Custom firmwares • elf - Emulators Also note that some applications are released as a '.dat' ROP chain, since they require execution under a specific exploit's environment (usually for access to certain system calls). 3DS emulation also isn't very good at the moment, so I had to test on real hardware, which was quite time consuming.