Qwarq Robotics

QBoy Gameboy Emulator

One programming assignment I had in college was to create a very simple interpreted assembly-like language. I ended up enjoying that so much that I added a bunch of additional instructions and got some extra credit on the assignment.

That lead me to look up programming documentation for the Gameboy and over the course of a few months and built up a simple emulator. The thing with making an emulator is that you're not going to get any recognizable output for quite a while, since just initializing a game and drawing to the screen requires many systems to be mostly complete. The first time I saw something recognizable was probably the most excited I've been about a programming project. I still remember jumping around my room in excitement at the sight of Metroid II's title screen.

Soon enough it could play most games fairly well. Pokemon Red/Blue still had garbled graphics, and the audio was awful though. So obviously I dove in to fix those important things... except I actually started adding all sorts of extra tools, like save states, rewinding, a memory viewer, a debugger, input recording and playback, etc. Those were a ton of fun to add, but that's about where it stands today. There are still a lot of issues, but I posted it in case anyone is curious or wants to use it as reference for their own project.

The emulator was written in C++ and uses the Allegro library for things like rendering and input. You can find the source code for it here if you want to have a look at it. Note that I'm not offering any support for it at all, so you're on your own if you want to build/use it.