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TS-GB

Build Status

TypeScript Game Boy emulator (WIP)

Asterix ran on ts-gb

How to use it

You can easily use all the classes provided by ts-gb to integrate it into a website or an electron app.

Wiring everything manually

$ yarn add ts-gb
import { System } from 'ts-gb/dist/system';

// Initializing a System instance that holds
// all the necessary components. You can also
// initialize each one of them manually if you
// want to.
const system = new System();

// Loading an optional bootrom
system.loadBootRom(arrayBuffer);

// Loading a game
system.loadGame(arrayBuffer);

// If you decide to change ROMs after
// initializing everything don't forget
// to reset all the components (CPU,
// memory, display, DMA handler)
system.reset();

Once that's done you'll have to handle the following things:

  • When a button is pressed you'll have to call system.joypad.down(button) followed by system.joypad.up(button) when it is released
  • The system.tick() method will have to be called at a frequency of 1MHz.

You'll then be able to use one of the two provided graphic renderers or to directly read the data returned by the system.display.getFrontBuffer() method everytime you want to refresh your screen (the closer from 59.7 FPS the better).

The audio is a bit harder to implement since you have to basically create all the noises yourself based on the state of the various channels of the Audio component. Luckily ts-gb also provides a basic Tone.js renderer that is probably accurate enough for most games.

If you want to see how all of that can be done take a look at the TS-GB Web implementation.