GameBoy++

A toy GameBoy emulator, written in modern C++. The project uses raylib for graphics, input and audio.

This project is a very early draft.

Features

• Graphics
• Input
  • Customisable via Lua scripting
• Audio playback
• ROM loading
• Lua scripting

Building

If you're using NixOS, see below.

The project uses xmake as a build system. If you don't already have it, go and install it via this link.

To build and run the project, just enter the following from the project root:

xmake run

NixOS

There is a flake.nix in the repo, so set up your environment with nix develop in the repository root. Then run the shell command in the previous section and you're done.

Contributing

This project adheres to conventional commits. This is because

• versioning, as conventional commits interface well with semantic versioning
• automated tooling supports the commit structure for changelog generation
• it enforces a way to think about your changes, leading to better commit messages

There is no silver bullet, so here is an article with tips on improving your commit messages. Keep your commits atomic.

Project scopes

The project defines the following three scopes, to be used in commits:

• gameboy – for emulator-specific functionality. The code living here should be able to run a ROM (in a headless way) from start to finish. This module is therefore runtime-agnostic and pluggable into any framework that provides graphics and audio.
• utility – for graphics abstractions and non-emulator specific functionality. This is closely intertwined with the runtime module below, but is used as an abstraction layer for the gameboy module to wrap it into graphics and audio frameworks. Specifically raylib.
• runtime – this is the executable binary for running the emulator as intended, though not the only way since gameboy is runtime-agnostic.

Keep commits small (atomic) and specific to these scopes. Exceptions are made for refactors and API changes in the libraries (gameboy and utility) that affect the library consumers.

pre-commit

This project uses pre-commit to validate code and enforce a common formatting. Install pre-commit and set it up by running the following command in the project root:

pre-commit install

This enables pre-commit to run the lint checks and autoformats your code on every commit.