Building a GameBoy emulator with Elixir and Scenic
summary
Builds a working but incomplete GameBoy emulator in Elixir + Scenic, boots Tetris ROM and renders frames by translating GameBoy tiles into textures. Implements CPU and MMU logic for roughly ~500 CPU instructions, 4 MHz emulation and uses a binary memory blob; performance is adequate but not fully cycle-accurate. Hits drawing limits in Scenic so created native texture API via NIFs to update pixels directly; HBlank/VBlank timing and some instruction bugs remain.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00The unexpected project
- 2:01Emulation goals and TDD
- 3:36Understanding the hardware
- 5:08CPU and memory implementation
- 7:35Booting and running instructions
- 10:41Graphics and tile rendering
- 12:21Introduction to Scenic UI
- 14:53Solving the rendering problem
- 17:54Optimizing with C NIFs
- 20:19Demo and debugging issues
- 23:46CRT timing and future work
- 25:43Conclusion and Q&A
- 27:43Technical details and debugging
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