gameboy-emu aims to be an efficient and portable Game Boy emulator.
Only the original Game Boy (DMG) is supported at this time.
The performance is the major consideration, and please look for an alternative emulator if accuracy is crucial to you.
gameboy-emu relies on some 3rd party packages to be fully usable and to
provide you full access to all of its features. You need to have a working
SDL2 library on your target system.
- macOS:
brew install sdl2 - Ubuntu Linux / Debian:
sudo apt install libsdl2-dev
Build the emulator.
makebuild/emu is the built executable file, and you can use it to load Game Boy
ROM files.
build/bench profiles the emulation of GBZ80 CPU.
Since the GNU/Linux build of bench uses perf_event_open, make sure to have
the permission to access the performance counters: either run the program as
superuser (discouraged) or set the value of perf_event_paranoid appropriately,
for example:
echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoidOptionally make it permanent with:
echo 'kernel.perf_event_paranoid=1' | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/local.confbuild/bench would print the rough number of CPU clock cycles spent in executing
the code during Game Boy emulation with Blargg's test ROMs.
| Action | Keyboard | Joypad |
|---|---|---|
| A | z | A |
| B | x | B |
| Start | Return | START |
| Select | Backspace | BACK |
| D-Pad | Arrow Keys | DPAD |
| Normal Speed | 1 | |
| Turbo x2 (Hold) | Space | |
| Turbo X2 (Toggle) | 2 | |
| Turbo X3 (Toggle) | 3 | |
| Turbo X4 (Toggle) | 4 | |
| Reset | r | |
| Change Palette | p | |
| Reset Palette | Shift + p | |
| Fullscreen | F11 / f | |
| Frameskip (Toggle) | o | |
| Interlace (Toggle) | i |
Frameskip and Interlaced modes are both off by default. The Frameskip toggles between 60 FPS and 30 FPS.
gameboy-emu is licensed under the MIT License.