Game Boy Advance Emulation 🚀
Rationale
This would be awesomeeeee!
It should take at least 4-8 months of work using 1-2 days of 4 hours.
I should have a working emulator for a complex ARM-powered 3D-capable machine.
Description
This is by any means a task at the same level as Game Boy / Game Boy Color. It is at least 2-5x more complex to emulate.
Mostly due to:
- More complex system to emulate: ARM CPU (parallel instruction execution)
- Complex PPU
- Timing issues, that create more profound issues
- Less available documentation
- Less testing software (ROMs)
We assume the accumulated knowledge-building past emulators will compensate for the added complexity.
The fact that we're building on top of the existing Boytacean code also enables us to re-use most of the existing infra to bootstrap some of the emulation processes quickly.
Implementation
- Quickly reach a point of emulating the logo of Game Boy Advance (AGB) BIOS
- Emulate the minimum amount of CPU instructions to be able to achieve it
- Emulate the minimum required PPU features to make it possible
- Emulate a simple game
Inspiration
Documentation
General
- gbatek
- emudev - system resources
- GBADev
- Game Boy Advance Architecture
- Tonc: Table of Contents
- Reddit - What are good resources for GBA development?
- Web Archive - Emulating the GBA
CPU
- ARM7TDMI Technical Reference Manual r4p1
- ARM7TDMI Instruction Set Reference
- Decoding the ARM7TDMI Instruction Set (Game Boy Advance)
- StackOverflow - OS-related operations and modes on ARM7TDMI(GameBoy Advance
- emutalk - GBA Emulation
- ARM CPU Deck
Bios
- Adventures in the GBA BIOS
- GitHub camthesaxman/gba_bios
- Reddit - [GBA] Does anyone have any information on the GameBoy Advance boot sequence?
Other
Emulators
Edited by João Magalhães