Game Boy Emulator: Project Update

I'm excited to announce two big things! First, the emulator can now play most Game Boy games with minimal issues! Secondly, the emulator is now open source on github! Go check it out at the following link,

Github Repository: https://github.com/Salgat/GameBoyEmulator-GBS

Above are some screenshots of the emulator in action (The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, Pokemon Red, and Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins). As of now two apparent issues occur: First, upon first starting the game, graphical glitches occur. Second, the timing is off which is most obvious with the scanline, which is out of sync and causes a slight graphical glitch. While the instruction test ROM works fine, the instruction timing ROM fails.

Additionally, even basic interface features are missing. The big issue that was holding me up for the past week was an issue where some games would randomly crash when trying to load a new section of the game. When checking the logger for my emulator and comparing the assembly instructions and memory state against BGB's emulator output, I was finding that the ROM was reading from the wrong memory bank. Unfortunately, nothing in the memory bank controller code looked wrong. I ended up having to log the entire output of the emulator up to the point of the crash, which included the register data, program counter, and some other relevant data, and stepping through BGB's emulator, instruction by instruction, until I could find the discrepancy which took about an hour to do. Eventually, I saw a point where the vertical blanking interrupt vector would trigger and set the wrong memory bank. It was only for a few instructions and not something I expected, but when the LCD is disabled, the current horizontal line stops incrementing. This isn't in any of the documentation I came across, so I'm guessing it's just assumed that you would know this. Unfortunately, I didn't make the assumption but thankfully the problem is now fixed.

While there is still a lot more work to be done (including adding more memory controller support), I'm glad to say that the emulator works on most of the games and works well! It's awesome seeing my favorite games from my childhood running in my own homegrown emulator.