Building a GameBoy Emulator: Getting Started

Are you interested in making a GameBoy emulator but you're not sure where or how to start? This video will help you figure that out. support the channel by buying me a coffee on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/systemoflevers This video focuses on evaluating machine code and provides a brief introduction to GameBoy assembly programming for context. It isn't a detailed step-by-step guide on how to build an emulator. I keep explanations fairly high level and I leave out a bunch of details so that you'll have plenty of things to figure out. If you need a next step, check out https://youtu.be/HjKNON3YHfY where I talk about the graphics system. If you're not sure if you have the experience needed to tackle this project I made a video to try to help answer that question: https://youtu.be/UW6DV3toxys If you're not sure why you would even want to do this I gave some reasons in this video: https://youtu.be/hy2yY5a1Z-0 References: Pan Docs: https://gbdev.io/pandocs/ Complete Technical Reference: https://gekkio.fi/files/gb-docs/gbctr.pdf GB Dev: https://gbdev.io/ Assembly Instructions: https://rgbds.gbdev.io/docs/v0.9.2/gbz80.7 RGBDS (Assembly programming toolchain): https://rgbds.gbdev.io/ Assembly programming resources: https://gbdev.io/resources.html#asm Machine code instruction table: https://gbdev.io/gb-opcodes/optables/ 0:00 Intro 0:15 prerequisites 1:09 confession 2:26 what is an emulator 4:02 specs and documentation 6:15 let's start 6:32 intro to machine code and assembly code 7:41 load instruction basics 8:06 registers 9:17 increment degrement load 9:56 SP/PC/F registers 11:18 machine code 12:43 endianness 13:04 start building something 14:14 ROMs 14:31 reading a ROM file 15:50 execution entry point 16:55 disassembling is hard actually 18:17 wrapping up