Now, I will not be striving for that level of emulation as the educational “return on investment” drops sharply.Ī cycle-accurate emulator attempts to mimic the characteristics of the original system such that the timings of the emulated system hews as close to the real system as possible. The intricacies of how the different pieces of hardware interacted with each other, and the extreme lengths the programmers went through to eke out every cycle of performance, means there’s an awful lot of obscure behavior that you must implement if you truly want a cycle-accurate emulator. So the job of an emulator writer is picking your battles and conceding that some things (certain games, in our case) cannot be made to work without a disproportionate amount of work versus what the return on that investment is.
There are also other considerations such as whether the host system is even capable of accurately emulating it in the first place. It’s not always feasible (or useful) to perfectly render unto your host system every hardware quirk or software foible the source system has. The determination of what is a good or bad emulator comes down to careful trade-offs. But, there’s a lot of obscured context to that statement: what does it mean to mimic something? How do you simulate the intricacies of an LCD - and do you even try or just settle for drawing stuff to your screen? What about the CPU, the RAM and the physical buttons? What about the cartridges that hold the games? In our case, the Game Boy emulator we’ll write will mimic as many of the components that make up the Game Boy as we need to, to make it work. Let’s briefly talk about what an emulator is. Popular games included Super Mario, Tetris and, of course, Pokémon.Īnd in this course I’m going to teach you how to write a Game Boy emulator in Python. It also had a Liquid-Crystal Display (LCD) screen, a directional game pad and a couple of keys action keys. The original Game Boy had a monochrome display an 8-bit Z80-style CPU with 4.194304 MHz a whopping 8 KiB of working RAM and 8 KiB of video RAM and 4 stereo sound channels. The 4.194304 MHz monochrome Game Boy released in 1989.īut for those of you who don’t know, the Game Boy is an iconic, portable gaming device designed to play computer games using cartridges you slot into the back of the device.
0 kommentar(er)
