Building a GameBoy Emulator: Getting Started

Are you interested in making a GameBoy emulator but you're not sure where or how to start? This video will help you figure that out.

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This video focuses on evaluating machine code and provides a brief introduction to GameBoy assembly programming for context. It isn't a detailed step-by-step guide on how to build an emulator. I keep explanations fairly high level and I leave out a bunch of details so that you'll have plenty of things to figure out.

If you need a next step, check out    • Building a Game Boy Emulator: How to Add G...   where I talk about the graphics system.

If you're not sure if you have the experience needed to tackle this project I made a video to try to help answer that question:    • Think you can't make a GameBoy emulator? W...  

If you're not sure why you would even want to do this I gave some reasons in this video:    • You Should Make a GameBoy Emulator  

References:
Pan Docs: https://gbdev.io/pandocs/
Complete Technical Reference: https://gekkio.fi/files/gb-docs/gbctr...
GB Dev: https://gbdev.io/
Assembly Instructions: https://rgbds.gbdev.io/docs/v0.9.2/gb...
RGBDS (Assembly programming toolchain): https://rgbds.gbdev.io/
Assembly programming resources: https://gbdev.io/resources.html#asm
Machine code instruction table: https://gbdev.io/gb-opcodes/optables/


0:00 Intro
0:15 prerequisites
1:09 confession
2:26 what is an emulator
4:02 specs and documentation
6:15 let's start
6:32 intro to machine code and assembly code
7:41 load instruction basics
8:06 registers
9:17 increment degrement load
9:56 SP/PC/F registers
11:18 machine code
12:43 endianness
13:04 start building something
14:14 ROMs
14:31 reading a ROM file
15:50 execution entry point
16:55 disassembling is hard actually
18:17 wrapping up