Welcome!
Introduction
In this blog, I’ll be documenting my journey of building a Gameboy Color emulator from scratch using the Rust programming language. Whether you’re a fellow programmer, retro gaming fan, or just curious about how emulators work, I hope you’ll find this blog interesting, informative, and maybe even a little fun.
Why a Gameboy Emulator?
1. Blast from the past
I’ve always had a love for retro stuff. Movies, music, devices, games — you name it. I feel like in a lot of cases, they have a certain charm that you can’t find in their modern day successors. Because of that, I’ve explored many different emulators, enjoying how they bring old systems back to life on modern machines.
2. The challenge
Building an emulator is difficult. It’s a complex, detail-oriented process that requires analyzing and reproducing how hardware behaves, from CPU instructions and hardware interrupts to graphics rendering and input handling. I wanted to take on this challenge head-on, knowing it would be time-consuming and sometimes frustrating, but ultimately extremely rewarding.
To spice things up even more, I’ve spent the last month learning Rust, and will be building the project in that.
3. The next big step
Before this, I worked on a Chip-8 interpreter project, which operates similarly to an emulator on a smaller scale. That experience gave me a taste of what it’s like to recreate a system from scratch, and now I’m ready to take the next big step: building a full Game Boy emulator.
What to expect
In future posts, I’ll be sharing:
- technical insights: breakdowns of how different parts of the emulator work
- challenges and solutions: the problems I encounter and the approaches I take to solve them
- behind-the-scenes info: thoughts, experiments, and progress updates as I work through each stage.
So stay tuned for more!