Category: Emulation

Gearsystem Emulator

Helius

So this is my latest project.

After finishing and polishing my Game Boy emulator I wanted a new challenge. Something a little bit more complex.

I tried the Master System and to my surprise I found that it is rather easy to emulate. The CPU (Zilog Z80) is somewhat harder but the system is quite simple compared to the Game Boy and Game Boy Color. Most games aren’t very sensitive to timing and the VDP is easy to implement.

So after some weeks of work I have it running most games flawlessly.

I made it multi-platform so it can run on iOS, Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Raspberry Pi.

You can get it here: https://github.com/drhelius/Gearsystem

And now what? NES maybe?

BTwqz9zCUAAfjf5

 

The rise and fall of Gearboy on Cydia

Helius

After several months of hard work my Game Boy Color emulator Gearboy can be considered as finished.

It has sound, full emulation of the most usual memory bank controllers, save files, disassembler, frame mixing and can be played on many platforms including Windows, Mac OS, Linux, iOS and Raspberry Pi.

The compatibility is pretty high. It can run almost all Game Boy and Game Boy Color games. Most of them run flawlessly.

If you are interested you can grab the full source code and binaries from here: https://github.com/drhelius/Gearboy

Some days ago I had the happy idea of selling the iOS port on Cydia. It was a good idea indeed.

This attracted a lot of people on Twitter and the news of a new Game Boy emulator running on iPhone 5 got viral. Quite a lot of people were asking me about the emulator, its features and when it was going to be released.

Gearboy eventually went live on Cydia and was selling pretty fast when suddenly, only a few hours later, I got an email from Saurik telling me he was having some issues with PayPal not allowing payments for the emulator. So he decieded to refund all customers and pull the emulator out of Cydia.

This was sad 🙁

Anyway, I learnt a lot by writing Gearboy and it was quite funny. In the end, my real interest is just to learn how consoles do work.

 

Gearboy: a Gameboy emulator hosted at github

Helius

It’s been a long time since I last tried to write a Gameboy emulator… 6 years methinks 🙂

That time I was struggling with my emulator written in C# and finally abandoned it.

And for the sake of completeness I just wanted to say that I’m now finishing it!

Some weeks ago I decided to give it another try, this time in C++ in order to run it on Windows, Linux, Mac and iOS…

Well, this is the result, it needs more work and lacks sound, but is compatible whith most roms.

You can see all the progress and source code in my github repository: https://github.com/drhelius/Gearboy

Open Source iOS and J2ME Chip-8 emulators

Helius

I decided to open source my two Chip-8 emulators for J2ME and iOS in GitHub.

The code is quick and dirty but fully functional and the emulation part is quite good. All the games I could find for Chip-8 and Super Chip run fine.

In fact, the iOS Chip-8 emulator was published as a paid application on the App Store during more than a year, before Apple kindly told me to remove it from the store due to some infringements of the terms (no emulators please :-()

So here it’s the repository for the J2ME edition: https://github.com/ignasan/J2ME-Chip-8-Emulator

And this is the iOS port: https://github.com/ignasan/iPhone-Chip-8-Emulator