A JavaScript Gameboy Emulator, Detailed In 8 Parts

Two9A writes "JavaScript has shed its image of being a limited language, tied to DOM manipulation in a browser; in recent years, new engines and frameworks have given JS a reputation as a language capable of bigger things. Mix this in with the new elements of HTML5, and you have the capacity to emulate a game console or other system, with full graphical output. This series of articles looks in detail at how an emulator is written in JavaScript, using the example of the Gameboy handheld: starting at the CPU, and (as of part 8) running a copy of Tetris."

Comments

There are already tons of Game Boy emulators...

[Anonymous Coward]

...but whenever I use one, I can't help but think "I sure wish this was written in Javascript, so there wouldn't be any way to save my game. Saved games are for pussies. And sure, it wouldn't support sound, but who needs that when you've got the beautiful noise of your computer fans running on full blast, thanks to its excessive CPU usage!"

Sound?

[Mr. Sketch]

I'm curious how he plans on handling dynamically generated sound from the GB ROM. Doing CPU and Graphics are usually the easy parts of emulating, but getting smooth dynamic sound without much latency is the challenge I've had to deal with when doing web-based emulators. Most web-based systems are designed to load a static set of sounds from a server, not dynamically generate them in the code.

Flash 10 provides some dynamic sound capability, but it has a rather large latency (~250ms). I blogged about this while writing my NES emulator in flash.

I read through these articles hoping for some insight on dynamically generated sound, but it doesn't look like he's gotten that far.