Gambatte 0.5.0-wip2 released

sinamas · Post by **sinamas** » Sun Aug 26, 2007 10:01 pm

*shameless plug*

Gambatte is an accuracy-focused, open-source, cross-platform Game Boy Color emulator written in C++. It is based on hundreds of corner case hardware tests, as well as previous documentation and reverse engineering efforts.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gambatte

ShadowFX · Post by **ShadowFX** » Sun Aug 26, 2007 10:58 pm

This looks much like bsnes, only in form of a Game Boy emulator. Tried a few games and all of them are running perfectly.

Post by **Nach** » Sun Aug 26, 2007 11:02 pm

Just what I was looking for, thanks for writing such a good program.

adventure_of_link · Post by **adventure_of_link** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 12:15 am

does it even emulate the RTC used in pokemon gold/silver/crystal?

creaothceann · Post by **creaothceann** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 12:44 am

Nice to see that Pauline's scream is emulated in Donkey Kong (at least in the first few levels).

The Windows interface seems to have a bug though: I'm using W/S/A/D/End/Del as input, and the S key activates the menu.

byuu · Post by **byuu** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 2:19 am

Ah, many congratulations on your first public release, sinamas!

I look forward to trying this out in the future. I especially like your user interface design! This should be perfect for my Linux box.

sinamas · Post by **sinamas** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 6:26 am

It's great hearing that someone seems to actually find this useful. Thanks.

adventure_of_link wrote:does it even emulate the RTC used in pokemon gold/silver/crystal?

It does. Let me know if you have any problems with it. It's otherwise pretty scarce on usage features. For instance joystick support and save states are missing.

creaothceann wrote:The Windows interface seems to have a bug though: I'm using W/S/A/D/End/Del as input, and the S key activates the menu.

Weird, I can't seem to reproduce it. In case noone noticed, the menu can be hidden with the 'Esc'-key.

creaothceann · Post by **creaothceann** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 3:09 pm

sinamas wrote:
creaothceann wrote:The Windows interface seems to have a bug though: I'm using W/S/A/D/End/Del as input, and the S key activates the menu.
Weird, I can't seem to reproduce it. In case noone noticed, the menu can be hidden with the 'Esc'-key.

Now it seems to work... maybe it's because I was running it for the first time.

Panzer88 · Post by **Panzer88** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 7:02 pm

for some reason none of the text displays in the text box in Dragon Warrior III for me, how odd. Also out of sheer ignorance, how does this emulator compare to KiGB?

On a side note it runs the unofficial Stunt Race FX Gameboy Tech Demo just fine.

The demo can be found here

further impressions:
the classic gameboy mono seems to be emulated in black and white rather than the green color, why is this? it makes text on certain games very difficult to read, although this isn't the problem with Dragon Warrior III as it is a Gameboy Color game.

I guess I'll stick with KiGB for now, but this looks excellent, I love accurate emulation, and I'm sure it's no easy task.

sinamas · Post by **sinamas** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 8:10 pm

Panzer88 wrote:for some reason none of the text displays in the text box in Dragon Warrior III for me, how odd.

That's very odd indeed. Do you have a screenshot of that? I can't reproduce it. Could it be the ROM?

Also out of sheer ignorance, how does this emulator compare to KiGB?

KiGB is a great emulator for compatibility. Unfortunately it fails every hardware test I've thrown at it (some spectacularly), besides being closed source. It must have taken a lot of effort going through all those ROMs, tweaking the emulator for them. The compatibility page on KiGB's homepage is quite misleading btw. Some things are outright wrong. The vast majority of the ROMs there that have issues in Gambatte depend on cartridge specific features that are impossible to detect (you'd have to gamble on nothing depending on these features not existing, and even then it would be wrong). There are maybe a handful that could be worth looking into though.

the classic gameboy mono seems to be emulated in black and white rather than the green color, why is this? it makes text on certain games very difficult to read, although this isn't the problem with Dragon Warrior III as it is a Gameboy Color game.

No real reason. I guess I just wasn't so keen on everything being green when I initially set the color values for that. The Game Boy Pocket didn't have green colors btw. I don't have a classic Game Boy mono, so I wouldn't have been able to make a good approximation anyway. Allowing custom color palettes for dmg games would probably be a good idea.

EDIT:
I'd just like to reiterate that KiGB is a great emulator. It's incredibly well tested to ensure that all available roms are compatible with it. It certainly works with several roms that fail in Gambatte no matter the reason.

creaothceann · Post by **creaothceann** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 8:29 pm

Will there be ZIP support?

(Hey, another thread for the sticky list IMO!

)

sinamas · Post by **sinamas** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 8:43 pm

Probably. Shouldn't be hard to add at least.

Panzer88 wrote:On a side note it runs the unofficial Stunt Race FX Gameboy Tech Demo just fine.

The tiny pieces of garbage that appear at times in that demo are supposed to be there by the way.

Snark · Post by **Snark** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 9:34 pm

Fantastic. I love to see bsnes-level/accuracy-oriented (not to mention open source) emulators being developed. The only feature truly missing imo would be input support. Anyway, great work.

adventure_of_link · Post by **adventure_of_link** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 9:54 pm

creaothceann: stickied

sinamas: how does it compare to BGB?

sinamas · Post by **sinamas** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 10:43 pm

BGB is probably the most accurate Game Boy emulator out there besides Gambatte. It has lots of nice features and a kick ass debugger. Too bad it's closed source and windows only (it works pretty well in older wine releases at least). I did run some timing tests on it, and they failed though.

creaothceann · Post by **creaothceann** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 10:51 pm

Do you know commercial games that have issues in other emulators?

Regarding cartridge-specific features - time for a database?* Either that, or adding headers / footers to the ROMs, which is iffy.

*user-editable, for new hacks, demos or even entire games

sinamas · Post by **sinamas** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 11:33 pm

There are several commercial games that have issues in most emulators. Some of the issues brought up on KiGB's compatibility pages are quite valid, and there are some that aren't quite right in any of the emulators tested (including KiGB).

Most if not all of the cartridge feature problems stem from unlicensed games and homebrew roms depending on flashcart features while identifying themselves as normal mbcs. I don't think I'll be doing any databases for unlicensed ROMs. I guess I could always add a seperate option for loading ROMs depending on typical flashcart features and the like.

I built some i386 debs on debian lenny. I haven't bothered posting them on sourceforge, but they might work on Ubuntu and other distros too. I'll possibly maintain Debian packages.

http://folk.ntnu.no/aamas/gambatte/gamb ... 1_i386.deb
http://folk.ntnu.no/aamas/gambatte/gamb ... 1_i386.deb

Panzer88 · Post by **Panzer88** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 5:04 am

thanks sinamas, looks like you're doing really great things and this is only the begining, I hope to see an increase in compatibility also soon. I'll try to upload a pic of Dragon Warrior III when I can.

Are there going to be more video options in the future such as filters or no?

franpa · Post by **franpa** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 5:09 am

hey Sinamas, great job, the stereo effect is much better then several other emulators i tried and so is the video output

keep up the good work.

-----
will support for joypads be added?
where is the configuration stored?

sinamas · Post by **sinamas** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 7:44 am

Panzer88 wrote:I hope to see an increase in compatibility also soon

Does that mean you've had other problems?

Panzer88 wrote:I'll try to upload a pic of Dragon Warrior III when I can.

You could mail it to me, or make a bug report on sourceforge (assuming it supports image uploads). Could you please also give me an md5sum or similar of the ROM? I've never seen any problems in Dragon Warrior III for as long as I've been working on this.

Panzer88 wrote:Are there going to be more video options in the future such as filters or no?

If your compatibility issues are real, then they'll certainly take priority over adding more video filters. There was a bug in the color conversion from 32-bit to 16-bit rgb used in filters in 16-bit mode by the way, which is fixed in svn. It's most visible in the bicubic filters. I might make a tiny bugfix release soon.

franpa wrote:will support for joypads be added?
where is the configuration stored?

Support for joypads would be nice, but I'd probably have to make several platform-specific implementations for the Qt version, which could take some time.

The configuration on windows is stored in the registry under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\gambatte. Saves are stored under %APPDATA%\gambatte meaning \Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\gambatte on XP. I'm considering changing it so that the configuration is stored there too. Qt is mostly handling this, and the registry is the default.

On UNIX-like platforms it's stored under $HOME/.config/gambatte. On OS X it's stored under $HOME/Library/Preferences/ I think.

franpa · Post by **franpa** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 8:40 am

thanks for the reply.

Thristian · Post by **Thristian** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 12:53 pm

So, people have been claiming that this is the BSNES of Gameboy emulation... is that (roughly) true? Cycle-accurate or better, few-to-no add-on chips supported, etc.?

How well-supported is the SDL front-end? Is it going to be developed further, or is it just a proof-of-concept for other people to work on who don't want to pick apart the Qt interface?

I built the SDL version of Gambatte on OS X, and had some issues - ideally anything that links against SDL would put

Code: Select all

$(sdl-config --cflags)

into the compiler/pre-processor's command-line and

Code: Select all

$(sdl-config --libs)

into the linker's command-line. Unfortunately I couldn't (quickly) figure out how to make SCons do that, and couldn't figure out how to set the linker flags at all - I wound up linking the final executable by hand. The flags you've got there by default are probably sufficient for a standard Linux version of SDL, but at least on OS X and probably other platforms, linking with SDL requires that you also link with a bunch of platform-specific system libraries.

byuu · Post by **byuu** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 4:11 pm

So, people have been claiming that this is the BSNES of Gameboy emulation... is that (roughly) true? Cycle-accurate or better, few-to-no add-on chips supported, etc.?

It's probably not very polite to continually compare sinamas' program to another system's emulator. His work stands on its own quite nicely. Well then, hopefully soon he will enjoy the praise when applied to future emulators, eg "is this the gambatte of GBA emulation", anyone? :D

And really, nothing about accuracy demands lack of features or support for add-on chips. Nestopia is a great example of the best of both worlds, for example. Any missing features are likely due to having only one active developer and a focus on core emulation before features, not a general dislike for them.

adventure_of_link · Post by **adventure_of_link** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 4:58 pm

sinamas: WERE there any special chips for the GB (save for the realtime clock, and even then pokemon gold/silver/crystal can still be played without the emulation)

creaothceann · Post by **creaothceann** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 6:09 pm

Fast-forward fast-forwards only within the limits of the screen refresh, so if you have vsync enabled in a fullscreen 60 Hz mode then it'll do nothing. (Apart from muting the sound of course.)