Gameboy emulator written with ebiten and running in the browser

[ArcticXWolf]

Hey,

first of all thanks for this great project! :)

I just wanted to show off a learning project of mine that was made possible with ebiten: AXWGameboy (Try it here in your browser)
It is a Gameboy/Gameboy Color emulator written in golang. It was cross platform in the past but because I had multiple problems adding meaningful UI elements to mobile platforms I switched to webassembly only. Nice sideeffect: everyone can try it in their browser without downloading anything. Almost all features of the GB and GBC are implemented except some bugs and everything to do with networking (link cable and infrared). Typical games like Pokemon, Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc run without problems.

A small list of how ebiten made it great to develop with it:

• Going from "emulated display sitting in an array" to having something visible on screen was just implementing the Game interface, very straightforward
• Switching between target platforms (before going for wasm) was a bliss, nearly no adjustments necessary
• Input detection works great, even the touch input worked without changes after switching from native android to wasm
• Performance is great (I believe mine dropped a bit on wasm, however before attributing any loss to ebiten I need to make my code better), at least on my PC and mobile phone.
• Nice community! The few questions I asked were either already answered or answered very fast :)

Things learned:

• While go-native development for android/IOS is possible, you really want to either use wasm or just use the golang code as a library inside a java application (for android), because UI development is very difficult. You either have to implement all UI yourself (yes, even onscreen keyboard) or wait for gomobile to mature further to provide access to those APIs. Nothing that ebiten can change, however it is important to be aware of
• Sound is hard! I had a hard time to wrap my head around PCM, buffers and syncing from the gameboy and finally resorted to adapting from another open-source emulator also written in go (but with the pixel library). It is on my TODO list to redo that work.

If you have any ideas or improvements, feel free to comment here or open an issue :)

Source: https://github.com/ArcticXWolf/AXWGameboy
Try it live: https://arcticxwolf.github.io/AXWGameboy/

Best,
ArcticXWolf