Emulating the Nintendo Game Boy CPU with Elm
summary
An Elm-based Game Boy CPU emulator compiles to JavaScript and runs ROMs in the browser with two ports: raw pixel canvas and Web Audio, successfully running games like Tetris and a demo Fibonacci program. Implementation uses opaque Word8/Word16 types, RAM as an Array of Word8, a 2000-line opcode map implementing roughly ~500 instructions, and a tight main loop targeting about one million cycles per second; performance tuning takes about half the development time, initial prototype runs at 1 FPS but becomes playable after optimization.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction to project
- 1:53Why Elm for emulation
- 3:57Game Boy CPU basics
- 6:01Implementing registers in Elm
- 7:05CPU instructions overview
- 8:31Instruction encoding details
- 9:35Memory management unit
- 10:37Main emulation loop
- 11:40Fibonacci demo walkthrough
- 15:34Next steps for full emulator
- 16:58Resources and Q&A
related talks
29mEmulating With JavaScript
56mEmulating a Game Boy in .NET 6
35mBuilding a GameBoy emulator with Elixir and Scenic
32mMaking an Emulator in JavaScript?
27mWriting an emulator in JavaScript?
46mEmulating the NES/Famicom/Dendy with Web Technologies
20mWriting a Game Boy Emulator in OCaml
40mBuilding a GameBoy emulator with Elixir and Scenic