bmarquismarkail/gameboycore

Gameboy Emulator Library

GameboyCore

GameboyCore is a Gameboy/Gameboy Color emulator library written in C++.

A library? Yes. This is a dependency free C++11 library. GameboyCore does not open a window to render frames, it does not collect user input or play audio. GameboyCore emulates the Gameboy system and provides the audio/video output through the GameboyCore API.

This means the emulation logic and GUI logic of an emulator are separate. As long as the target platform has a C++11 compiler that platform can run GameboyCore!

GameboyCore running as:

• A desktop application
• A libretro core in RetroArch
• Python bindings, usable with pygame
• An Android App
• In the Web

The above application are somewhat incomplete however they all demonstrate GameboyCore working for the given environment.

Building

The GameboyCore library does not have any dependencies and can be compiled using any C++11 compiler. The tools contained in this repo, however, do have additional dependencies that need to be installed. All dependencies should be findable by CMake.

Fetch source:

git clone https://github.com/nnarain/gameboycore
cd gameboycore
git submodule update --init --recursive

To build the library, simply run cmake.

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build . --target gameboycore

Building Tests

Install gtest and build with BUILD_TESTS=ON. Optionally you can setup benchmarks by installing google-benchmark.

cmake .. -DBUILD_TESTS=ON
cmake --build . --target check
cmake --build . --target bench

A few test ROMs can be run as well.

cmake --build . --target run_test_roms

Building Tools

Enable building tools by specifying BUILD_TOOLS=ON. If building tools is enabled, all will be built by default. Disable building tools with WITH_<tool name>=OFF.

All tools are compiled with the latest C++ standard.

Debugger:

• Used for running Gameboy ROMs and inspecting the core
• Depends on SFML

RomInfo

• Used for printing the information in the ROM header