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Gameboy Color Emulator: A brilliant use of HTML5 (gamecenter.grantgalitz.org)

68 points by corwinstephen ↗ HN
One of the most brilliant uses of HTML5 I've ever seen. The technique he used to build this is beyond my comprehension at this point, but I'd certainly love to dive into his code (which is available publicly on Github) and figure it all out!

26 comments

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[dead] rsanchez1
Must be that time of the month to post this page from grantgalitz.org.
DiabloD3
This is the third time this has been featured on the front page of HN. Not that I'm complaining, its a neat pile of Javascript.
grantgegalitz
Yeah seriously, there has to be other js projects... :P
mbel
Has anyone suceeded in running it in any browser on any smartphone? It seems to fail on Windows Phone's IE. However, it works perfectly in few desktop browsers (including IE9), I've tried.

Anyway it seemes, that gameboy game format could be used as some kind of lightweight format for cross-platform browser games. It could enable publishing small browser games without giving away js sources or using third-party plug-ins.

pilif
Works fine (not at full frame rate, but playable) on an iPad 3. No sound of course. The Audio APIs still aren't just there yet for dynamically generated audio.
lbo
Same with the iPhone 4s, though it tried to download the .js file first and didn't start working until I hit back. Load time was also much longer on the iPhone 4 over the same connection. Low framerate is hard to play through :/
city41
Works fine on an iPad 1 as well. Although I'm sure much slower.
_frog
Related, GBA.js is a project a friend of mine has been working on to make a GameBoy Advance emulator in pure Javascript. A WIP version is running at http://endrift.com/gbajs/index.html but there's a lot of bugs and compatibility is far from perfect. Source code is all on GitHub at https://github.com/jpfau/gbajs/
duqee
Really cool, but on other Gameboy emulators I have used including the visual boy advanced, Z=A and X=B this is the other way around for any reason?
jasonkostempski
Because on the physical Gameboy the B is on the left and A is on the right but then again the DPad is on the left and the buttons are on the right and I use my thumbs instead of fingers so I'm not sure copying the physical layout for just this one particular thing improves the experience any.
Keyframe
I'm not that familiar with html5/js, but I am curious if it is viable to develop games for it old-school. What I mean by that is having a framebuffer and direct per pixel control. Is this what people do?
TazeTSchnitzel
Canvas w/ ImageData lets you do exact pixel control, and with requestAnimationFrame you can time animations best for the system.
Keyframe
Thanks! But do people use that for web game development at all?
TazeTSchnitzel
I've certainly used it myself (for loading levels - bitmaps are great for level designing), dunno about performance with direct pixel access. It may be higher or lower.
pimentel
Aren't game ROMs illegal to distribute? How legal is this?
TazeTSchnitzel
Definitely illegal, I'm sure he'll get a C&D eventually.
huhhhuhh
Started to download this. It appears to be malware infected.
grantgegalitz
There is nothing to download.... It's just a webpage...