Gearboy

Copyright © 2012 by Ignacio Sanchez

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Gearboy is a Nintendo Game Boy / GameBoy Color emulator written in C++ that runs on iOS, Raspberry Pi, Mac, Windows and Linux.

Follow me on Twitter for updates: http://twitter.com/drhelius

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Downloads

• iOS (Jailbreak): Cydia. You can open rom files from other apps like Safari or Dropbox. They can be placed in /var/mobile/Media/ROMs/GAMEBOY too. Save files are placed in /var/mobile/Library/Gearboy
• iOS: Build Gearboy with Xcode and transfer it to your device. You can open rom files from other apps like Safari or Dropbox, or use iTunes file sharing.
• Mac OS X: brew install homebrew/games/gearboy
• Windows: Gearboy-1.6-Windows.zip (NOTE: You may need to install the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable)
• Linux: [Gearboy-1.6-Linux.tar.gz](http://www.geardome.com/files/gearboy/Gearboy-0.8-Linux.tar.
• Raspberry Pi: Build Gearboy from sources. Optimized projects are provided for Raspberry Pi 1 and 2/3.

Features

• Highly accurate CPU emulation, passes cpu_instrs.gb from blargg's tests.
• Accurate instruction timing, passes instr_timing.gb from blargg's tests.
• Memory Bank Controllers (MBC1, MBC2, MBC3 with RTC, MBC5), ROM + RAM and multicart cartridges.
• Accurate LCD controller emulation. Background, window and sprites, with correct timings and priorities.
• Mix frames: Mimics the LCD ghosting effect seen in the original Game Boy.
• Sound emulation using SDL Audio and Gb_Snd_Emu library.
• Game Boy Color support.
• Integrated disassembler. It can dump the full disassembled memory to a text file or access it in real time.
• Saves battery powered RAM cartridges to file.
• Compressed rom support (ZIP deflate).
• Multi platform. Runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Raspberry Pi and iOS.

Build Instructions

iOS

• Install Xcode for Mac OS X. You need iOS SDK 8 or later.
• Build the project.
• Run it on real hardware using your iOS developer certificate. Make sure it compiles on Release for extra optimizations.
• For jailbroken devices use the jailbreak branch.

Raspberry Pi 2 & 3 - Raspbian

• Install and configure SDL 2 for development:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install build-essential libfreeimage-dev libopenal-dev libpango1.0-dev libsndfile-dev libudev-dev libasound2-dev libjpeg-dev libtiff5-dev libwebp-dev automake
cd ~
wget https://www.libsdl.org/release/SDL2-2.0.4.tar.gz
tar zxvf SDL2-2.0.4.tar.gz
cd SDL2-2.0.4 && mkdir build && cd build
../configure --disable-pulseaudio --disable-esd --disable-video-mir --disable-video-wayland --disable-video-x11 --disable-video-opengl --host=armv7l-raspberry-linux-gnueabihf
make -j 4
sudo make install

• Install libconfig library dependencies for development: sudo apt-get install libconfig++-dev.
• Use make -j 4 in the platforms/raspberrypi2/Gearboy/ folder to build the project.
• Use export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=ALSA before running the emulator for the best performance.
• The emulator generates a gearboy.cfg configuration for you where you can customize keyboard and gamepads. Key codes are from SDL.

Windows

• You need Visual Studio 2010 or better.
• Install the Qt 5 SDK for Windows.
• Install the Qt 5 Visual Studio Add-in and point it to the Qt SDK.
• Install and configure SDL 2 for development.
• In order to use OpenGL extensions I used GLEW. This is because of a bug in QGLFunctions. Make sure the GLEW headers and libs are configured within VC++.
• Open the Gearboy Visual Studio project and build.

Mac OS X

• You need Qt Creator, included in the Qt 5 SDK.
• Install Xcode and run xcode-select --install in the terminal for the compiler to be available on the command line.
• Install the Qt 5 SDK for Mac OS.
• Download SDL 2 source code. Then run this commands:

./configure
make
sudo make install

• Open the Gearboy Qt project with Qt Creator and build.

Linux

• Install Qt 5 development dependencies (Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install qt5-default qttools5-dev-tools).
• Install OpenGL development dependencies (Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install freeglut3-dev).
• Install SDL 2 development dependencies (Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install libsdl2-dev).
• In order to use OpenGL extensions I used GLEW dependencies (Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install libglew-dev). This is because of a bug in QGLFunctions.
• Move to the platforms/linux/Gearboy/ folder and run qmake -o Makefile Gearboy.pro && make to build the project.
• In Ubuntu I had to export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=ALSA before running the emulator for the sound to work properly.

Accuracy Tests

Compared to other emulators: see here.

Tests from blargg's test roms:

Screenshots

License

Gearboy - Nintendo Game Boy Emulator

Copyright (C) 2012 Ignacio Sanchez

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/