pandocs VS rosettaboy

Use https://gbdev.io/pandocs/ , https://gbdev.io/gb-opcodes/optables/ and https://github.com/gbdev/awesome-gbdev to get started.

Probably the most important one (the one I've used the most for reference) was the Game Boy Pandocs.

Based on my reading of https://gbdev.io/pandocs/

The pandocs are probably the most up to date documentation about the GameBoy in existence. It's a console which is still under active research - these days it's very focused on the extremely low level hardware behaviour.

The Pandocs are easy to read and contain pretty much everything you need to know to get a basic GB emulator up-and-running. The section on the Power-Up Sequence would answer this question for you and then some. You would've gotten the answer to your question yesterday if you looked at the Memory Map section, which tells you where ROM is mapped, and then some.

Does anyone know of good documentation beyond: - Pan Docs - The Cycle-Accurate Game Boy Docs - Complete Technical Reference - Nitty Gritty Gameboy Cycle Timing

For actual documentation, you probably know the pandocs, but there are a lot of more specific information in the docs linked in their references, especially the cycle-accurate GB docs, the GB complete technical reference by Gekkio. You can also check the source code of the relevant test roms, like the Blargg’s test roms for more general behaviour and the MooneyeGB test suite for more specific things.

For the Game Boy, being a closed system, there's fewer resources. Nintendo made a programming manual, but it's not very good. Pandocs is a good supplement: https://gbdev.io/pandocs/

Very cool article!

If you want to know more about the hardware side of the Game Boy (Color), have a look at the Pan Docs: https://gbdev.io/pandocs/

It's been revamped in the recent years, in terms of presentation. I do kind of miss the old version which had a refreshing "old-school" UI like the RFCs of the IETF, but the newest version is IMHO much more usable when developing an emulator.

As somebody who has written the same gameboy emulator in C++, Rust, and Zig (as well as C, Go, Nim, PHP, and Python) - I have yet to find a place where language affected emulation correctness.

Gameboy audio is kind of a pain in the ass (at least compared to CPU, which is fairly easy, and GPU, which is easy to get "good enough” if you don’t care about things like palette colours being swapped mid-scanline) - and some languages take more or less code to do the same thing (eg languages which allow one block of memory to be interpreted in several different ways concurrently will make the “interpret audio RAM as a bunch of registers” code much shorter with less copying) - but in my case at least, each one of my implementations actually has the same audio distortions, presumably because I’m misreading some part of the hardware spec :P

https://github.com/shish/rosettaboy/

(Also yes, the zig version is currently failing because every time I look at it the build system has had breaking changes...)

Niceness is subjective, but Nim is just as valid an addition to that group. Nim compiles to C and has had an --os=standalone mode for like 10 years from its git history, and as mentioned else-thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36506087) can be used for Linux kernel modules. Multiple people have written "stub OSes" in it (https://github.com/dom96/nimkernel & further along https://github.com/khaledh/axiom).

While it can use clang as a backend, Nim does not rely upon LLVM support like Zig or Rust (pre-gcc-rust working). Use on embedded devices is fairly popular: https://forum.nim-lang.org/search?q=embedded (or web search).

Latency-wise, for a time, video game programming was a perceived "adoption niche" or maybe "hook" for Nim and games often have stringent frame rendering deadlines. If you are interested in video games, you might appreciate https://github.com/shish/rosettaboy which covers all but Ada in your list with Nim being fastest (on one CPU/version/compiler/etc). Note, however, that cross-PL comparisons are often done by those with much "porting energy" but limited familiarity with any but a few of the PLs. A better way to view it is that "Nim responds well to optimization effort" (like C/Ada/C++/Rust/Zig).

https://github.com/shish/rosettaboy

The same gameboy emulator rewritten in C++, Go, Nim, PHP, Cython, Python, Rust, and Zig (and WIP typescript); mostly to teach myself the languages and to compare and contrast their idioms.

Also, when taken with a very large grain of salt, usable as a language benchmark (As with all benchmarks, there are lots of caveats - but as far as I’m aware this is unique in being “the same code in multiple languages” and “several thousand lines of code”):

  $ ./utils/bench.py

Looks very polished, but major disappointment that it's not showcasing OCaml as part of RosettaBoy (https://github.com/shish/rosettaboy)

I’m working on it :) https://github.com/shish/rosettaboy

(Ok it’s 5-10k lines rather than a million, but it’s non-trivial enough that the differences between languages are noticable)