Retro Boy: simple Game Boy emulator written in Rust, can be played on the web

> I hear a few problems with the audio emulation, (mostly clicks that shouldn't be there)

Almost anything WASM+Audio seems to do that in browsers today, unless you're really really careful about what you're doing and leverage multiple threads. I think the issue is mostly around single-thread contexts, where it has to switch between playing audio and other things.

I hit the very same issue myself with Bevy not too long time ago, and tracking this issue which has some further links if you wanna go down a rabbit-hole: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/4078

i combed through quite a few hobbyist gb emulators while writing mine and found audio to be pretty rarely finished or finished without issues. not sure if it's the same for NES

Enthusiast noob question. What do you use for display / rendering / gui when doing emulators for wasm?

if people want more info on these devices, russ from retro game corps does a ton of reviews on them, from the cheapest (that are less than 30 euro) to the really expensive ones (600+!).

i myself own a retroid pocket 5, one trimui brick (which my wife adores) and a steam deck (yes, it's an amazing retro gaming machine).

(retro catalog also has a ton of technical information, including ratings)

https://www.youtube.com/@RetroGameCorps

https://retrogamecorps.com/

https://retrocatalog.com/

I bought an Analogue Pocket which sounds similar to what you have and I've found the games... underwhelming. I've tried a lot of games (the internet archive has them for some reason) and the only ones I've wanted to play more than once is the original Tetris and a game I don't remember the name of but it has numbers at the top and sides which you use to deduce which cells are on and eventually you reveal a pixel image.

I never had one of these devices while they were current which makes me wonder if the key ingredient to enjoying one is nostalgia?

I also have a Sony PSP (bought around 2010) which is a great bit of hardware, but I have yet to find a game that appeals to me.

I've had the best luck with the Argon USB C power supplies for RaspberryPi 3/4 connected to USB/SATA adapters with SSDs. Most other power supplies I've tried get low power warnings constantly. The inline power switch is cool to, though less useful with the cases I've used.

Miyoo Mini Plus. It's fantastic!

Thanks for posting this! Your repo is very nicely organized.

I've been wanting to get in to making an emulator (chip8). I decided early I wanted it to run on wasm, but have been stuck in the weeds of what framework/tools to use to actually get it done. I've looked into game engines and egui, but they just add so much extra complexity.

I think seeing your repo I'm just going to try the straight wasm-bindgen + canvas route. So thanks again for making this.

Kirby's Dream Land is pretty fun too (esp after watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBRt2D2YN44 which is where the creator talks about the concepts of the game)

Pokemon - Red/Blue or Gold/Silver, and Legend of Zelda: Links Awakening.

The game boy Tetris was the first version I played, it was pretty good.

Nowdays for a mobile Tetris option i'm using a SNES emulator on my phone (Snes9x EX) and Super Tetris.

Meanwhile, there are companies creating on the web and mobile app versions of Tetris, inserting ads and charging money for what should be free.

Super Mario Land is a good place to start. The music is great, and it is very short and pretty easy.

Link's Awakening is my favorite Zelda game.

The original Pokemon games (Red/Blue, Gold/Silver) that others are recommending are pretty rough these days, but it's fun to see where it all started if you have the patience for them.

If you want something a little less well-known, Bubble Ghost is a fun little puzzler.

Regardless of what you try, remember that this is the era when game manuals were required reading since they rarely were able to fit tutorials & instructions in-game. It's good to scan through the manual first before you play something or you might be missing some critical information.

Super Mario Land, 1 and 2. Dr. Mario.

Game Boy games tended to be limited due to space constraints.

Tetris or Pokemon Red.

Pokemon is actually a really difficult game before modern QOL. No DLC!

For the original GameBoy, without a doubt: Zelda Link's Awakening.

It's always good to see usernames I recognize from the other site.

Same, first emulator I ever used, maybe a little after you (Windows 98)

The ability to speed up time made leveling up pokemon so much easier back in the day. Walking back and forth in the grass.

Also my first introduction to save states outside the game itself / quick loading.

WebRender recently got much slower in Firefox [0].

I haven't looked at the source yet, but if the bitmaps aren't all preallocated, then it'll run into this repeatedly.

[0] https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl...

For me it runs at full speed in both stable and developer versions of Firefox (but even then, audio is bad at times). But still, I looked at performance out of curiosity.

After running it under FF's profiler for a moment, it looks like a sync executed after every opcode recalculates the framebuffer (`step_until_next_audio_buffer -> cpu::microops::read_byte_from_memory -> emulator::sync -> gpu::scanline::write_scanlines`) and uploads it to the canvas with `putImageData`, which takes ~35% of execution time. Sounds like that could be redundant work, since I'm pretty sure the canvas isn't actually redrawn until the wasm execution yields back to the browser.

EDIT: also, the emulator can't really be ran in debug mode, since 1. it blows the wasm stack (presumably when creating the huge `Emulator` struct, a not uncommon issue in Rust; I had to hack in bigger stack size with linker args), and 2. is panics on int overflows `apu::step`.

ofc it is firefox