Old game systems are usually the most popular simulation targets. With the huge fan community hoping to recreate the good old days, most of the old systems are brought back to life in this way. However, some people go deep into the simulation just for the technical challenge, with [Austin Appleby] GateBoy does just that.
GateBoy is a project that simulates Game Boy logic gates through logic gates.This is a lower level method based on earlier work [Austin] Made a project called MetroBoy, We recommended before.
The simulator was created through painstaking reverse engineering of the logic of the Game Boy. This is done by carefully studying the die of the actual DMG-01 CPU chip. GateBoy simulates most of the chips, but avoids audio hardware at this stage.
Currently, GateBoy runs at approximately 6-8 frames per second on modern 4GHz CPUs. It turns out that simulating all these gates and various clock phases in DMG-01 requires a lot of processing power. However, compilation optimization has done a lot of heavy work, so in some respects, GateBoy’s running speed is impressive.
[Austin] There is still a lot of work to be done before GateBoy is fully operational, and there are some strange quirks of the Game Boy hardware that need to be figured out. In any case, this is indeed an amazing academic exercise and a noble endeavour. At the same time, you may want to view a Game Boy emulator that only runs one game.