Linuxboy (WIP)

Linuxboy is a (hopefully) feature-rich Game Boy emulator mostly intended to be used as a full-blown debugger. I'll most likely write a series of blog posts explaining the inner working in the near future to help emulator beginners understand how the Game Boy worked and how to implement it in code, but for now just I'll focus on actually developing the damn thing.

Status

Currently the emulator supports most of the features of the original Game Boy except for audio and other types of memory banking which are not MBC1.

TODO's

Near future TODO's

• Finish memory banking
• Implement Saving
• Enable/Disable Bootrom
• Remove Bootrom dependency
• Fix sprites rendering priority

I'll do it someday, stop bothering TODO's

• Audio support
• Button remapping
• Joypad support
• Graphical debugger

Tested Games List

Keep in mind that full compatibility doesn't mean perfect emulation, it just means that no errors have been found yet.

Game	Compatibility	Notes
Tetris	🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵
Dr. Mario	🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵
Bubble Ghost	🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵
Kirby's Dream Land	🔵🔵🔵🔵⚪️	Kirby's inhale behaves weirdly sometimes.
Kirby's Dream Land 2	⚪️⚪️⚪️⚪️⚪️	Won't boot.
Legend of Zelda, The: Link's Awakening	🔵🔵🔵⚪️⚪️	Tiles sometimes don't load properly when switching areas.
Mega Man II	🔵🔵🔵🔵⚪️	Sprites are sometimes rendered below tiles. (Air Man)
Metroid II: Return of Samus	🔵🔵🔵🔵️🔵	Samus is invisible for the first part of the game.
Tennis	🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵
Super Mario Land	🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵
Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins	🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵
Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3	🔵🔵🔵🔵⚪️	Sprites sometimes flicker when in little Wario mode
Pac-Man	🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵
Donkey Kong	🔵🔵️⚪️️⚪️⚪️	Weird flashing on menu and levels.
Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge	🔵🔵🔵⚪️⚪️	HUD is displayed weirdly, tiles pop in and out mid game.
F-1 Race	🔵🔵️️⚪️⚪️⚪️	Race track is not rendered properly.

Screenshots

Building

Linuxboy depends on SDL2 and GLEW for rendering which can be easily installed by using your preferred package manager.

To compile just run:

make

And to run:

./lboy rom [-options]

Command line options

usage: ./lboy rom [-h] [-b addr] [-s scale [-x width -y height]] [-w addr] [-l state]

• -b, --break: set breakpoint at 'addr' (hex).
• -h, --help: print help message and quit.
• -s, --scale: set screen width to 160 * 'scale' and screen height to 144 * 'scale'.
• -x, --width: set screen width to 'width'.
• -y, --height: set screen height to 'height'.
• -w, --watch: add 'addr' to the watch list.
• -l, --state: load CPU state from 'state'.
• -n, --bootstrap: load bootstrap.

Controls

Key	Action
w	UP
s	DOWN
a	LEFT
d	RIGHT
j	A
k	B
u	START
i	SELECT
q/F1	QUIT
F2	DEBUG
F3	DUMP TILE MAP
F4	SAVE CURRENT STATE
F5	DISABLE V-SYNC