SameBoy

SameBoy is an open source Gameboy (DMG) and Gameboy Color (CGB) emulator, written in portable C. It has a native Cocoa frontend for OS X, and an incomplete experimental SDL frontend for other operating systems. It also includes a text-based debugger with an expression evaluator.

Features

Features common to both Cocoa and SDL versions:

• Supports Gameboy (DMG) and Gameboy Color (CGB) emulation
• Lets you choose the model you want to emulate regardless of ROM
• Includes open source DMG and CGB boot ROMs:
  • Complete support for (and documentation of) all game-specific palettes in the CGB boot ROM, for accurate emulation of Gameboy games on a Gameboy Color
  • Supports manual palette selection with key combinations, with 4 additional new palettes (A + B + direction)
  • Supports palette selection in a CGB game, forcing it to run in 'paletted' DMG mode, if ROM allows doing so.
  • Support for games with a non-Nintendo logo in the header
  • No long animation in the DMG boot
• Has a text-based debugger with an expression evaluator
• Emulates PCM_12 and PCM_34 registers
• Emulates LCD timing effects, supporting the Demotronic trick, GBVideoPlayer and other tech demos
• Accurate instruction and memory timings
• Real time clock emulation

Features currently supported only with the Cocoa version:

• Native Cocoa interface, with support for all system-wide features, such as drag-and-drop and smart titlebars
• Retina display support, allowing a wider range of scaling factors without artifacts
• High quality 96KHz audio
• Battery save support
• Save states
• Optional frame blending
• Several scaling algorithms (Including exclusive algorithms like OmniScale and Anti-aliased Scale2x)

Compatibility

SameBoy passes many of blargg's test ROMs, as well as most of mooneye-gb's acceptance tests. SameBoy should work with most games and demos, please report any broken ROM.

Compilation

SameBoy requires the following tools and libraries to build:

• clang
• make
• Cocoa port: OS X SDK and Xcode command line tools
• SDL port: SDL.framework (OS X) or libsdl (Other platforms)
• rgbds, for boot ROM compilation

On Windows, SameBoy also requires:

• Visual Studio (For headers, etc.)
• GnuWin
• Running vcvars32 before running make. Make sure all required tools and libraries are in %PATH% and %lib%, repsectively.

To compile, simply run make. The targets are cocoa (Default for OS X), sdl (Default for everything else) and bootroms. You may also specify CONF=debug (default) or CONF=release to control optimization and symbols, and specify BOOTROMS_DIR=... to a directory containing precomiled dmg_boot.bin and cgb_boot.bin files, otherwise the build system will compile and use SameBoy's own boot ROMs.

SameBoy was compiled and tested on OS X, Ubuntu and Windows 7 32-bit.