Blazing Trails: Building the World's Fastest GameBoy Emulator in Modern C++
Talkat CppCon 2024 · on Thursday, 2024-09-19· at 15:15· Cottonwood 2/3, 6700 North Gaylord Rockies Boulevard·
summary
Claims a world's fastest GameBoy emulator by implementing core DMG-001 components in modern C++, measuring concrete throughput (about 50M instructions in 200 ms → 250 MBS on the presenter’s machine). Uses a webAssembly frontend and olc Pixel Game Engine for display, targets Tetris (ROM size 32,768 bytes, M-cycle precision suffices), explores tradeoffs between runtime maps and compile‑time arrays, and shows which optimizations actually lift speed versus which are just noisy anecdotes.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction and motivation
- 1:21Game Boy architecture overview
- 7:16Hardware and memory mapping
- 14:24Instruction set analysis
- 19:01Selecting and using Tetris
- 24:23Audio, AI, and project scope
- 27:48User interface with PGE
- 32:33Implementation strategy
- 35:45Simple assembly example
- 43:26Refining the implementation
- 50:22Compile-time optimization
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