GameBoy.jl

A GameBoy emulator.

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Introduction

There are as many Game Boy emulators as ther eare users on GitHub. Why make another one? And why use Julia?

I grew up playing Pokémon and thought that it would be fun to build agents to play the game autonomously. I also spent the majority of my career using languages built on top of LLVM from C++, to Rust, and now Julia. Mostly switching to the language best suited to the problem domain.

Since I am primarily focused on Julia and this side project benefits from the performance and distributed computing aspects of Julia it was an easy choice. While Julia easily integrates with C, C++, and Python building the emulator within Julia reduces friction. Sublime, Julia LSP, and the testing/documentation infrastructure can be reused across projects. @code_llvm and @distributed work for both the emulator and any agents I build. Less context switching overall.

Installation

This project is published in the Melted Tofu Registry. To use GameBoy.jl, add the registry (]registry add https://github.com/meltedtofu/MeltedTofuRegistry.git) and then use the usual package commands to install ]add GameBoy.

Quickstart

The engine is primarily targeted as an engine for game playing agents.

The emulator is driven externally by whatever application you want to build. Just call doframe! to emulate the next frame and receive a matrix of pixels.

using GameBoy

e = Emulator("path-to-rom.gb")
for i in 1:1*60*60
    doframe!(e)
end

For more complex intractions (read: any interaction at all) check out the tutorials.

License Information

This project uses the MIT license. You can find the full text in LICENSE.