Homebrew GBC emulator for the DS?

[Ice God64]

Well, a little warning, I've tried playing Oracle of Ages and Seasons, ans saving crashes the DS and screws up you SDcard, last time I checked. Anyone else familiar with that happening?

 

[DanTheManMS]

It's certainly possible, but I feel that he would have kept his subdomain on nutki.com if that was true.QUOTE(DanTheManMS @ Feb 27 2009, 10:43 AM) Looks like it's more than just the subdomain that's gone. I'm guessing he let the whole domain expire and someone else snatched it up in the downtime.

Which domain are you talking about?
http://lameboy.nutki.com/ works for me.

It was giving Wordpress's version of a 404 Page Not Found error up until now. Seems to be up now, you're right.

 

[Shabadage]

Unfortunately that's not possible, at least not at the moment. That colorization data is actually hardcoded directly into the GBC's BIOS, with each game having its own entry. As nobody has been able to dump the GBC BIOS, we cannot get access to that data.

There's nothing to stop us from creating our own database of colorization data, but we'd have to do it ourselves for each game. Perhaps a Game Boy Player + compatible video card could be used to get a screenshot of the game and capture the appropriate color values in a way the emulator could accept, but this is purely theoretical at this point.

Fun fact: the original Game Boy BIOS is similarly difficult to dump. The only way it was accomplished was through the use of dyes, an electron microscope, and a lot of patience in reading back ones and zeros bit-by-bit. Same approach doesn't appear to be possible for the GBC though, sadly.

I don't think he's talking about the games like pokemon and the like that had that hard data in the bios. I think he's referring to the colorization function for the games that didn't have that data. You could do it by pressing a or b in combination with a direction on bootup (GBA had this too I think). I remember some idiot yelling at me in one of the release threads saying it wasn't possible because the bios wasn't dumped. That person had obviously never used a GBC. It's perfectly within reason to accomplish (again, NOT the ones with the built in color) and I suspect rather easy as well (simply change the color values). You wouldn't get the 8 colors of the built in games, but you'd get 4 colors. But it seems that lameboy is dead, so we probably won't see this added. I would have killed for customizable controls.

 

[DanTheManMS]

What you're talking about is all done from the GBC BIOS. Both the hard-coded data values and the "press A/B and direction" colorization feature were both done by the BIOS. Obviously GBC-only games would have their own colors built into the rom, but that's not what I'm talking about.

Of course it wouldn't be too difficult to figure out our own database of what those 8 different palette options were, but nobody has done that to my knowledge. The point is that that data is not stored in the rom but in the BIOS itself.

 

[Shabadage]

What you're talking about is all done from the GBC BIOS. Both the hard-coded data values and the "press A/B and direction" colorization feature were both done by the BIOS. Obviously GBC-only games would have their own colors built into the rom, but that's not what I'm talking about.

Of course it wouldn't be too difficult to figure out our own database of what those 8 different palette options were, but nobody has done that to my knowledge. The point is that that data is not stored in the rom but in the BIOS itself.

Perhaps I didn't explain myself properly. I'm not talking about using the bios to do this. I'm talking about using a custom palette. The GB can do 4 "colors". Changing those colors would be rather simple. Just a menu option. You wouldn't be able to do it at boot up with the button/direction code, but with a simple menu option. Do you get what I'm talking about?

The GB doesn't say "This has to be green", all it says is "This has to be darker". You'd use what is essentially a wrapper where it swaps the "darker" command with a color value.

 

[Vague Rant]

Goomba Color has had that functionality for as long as I remember.

 

[hdofu]

The super gameboy versions seem to have killed some gbc games (for instance Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle 4 no longer works)

 

[DanTheManMS]

Well then yeah, that's easy enough to do. Kuwanger even made a fork of Goomba that lets you add your own custom palettes (Goomba Paletted) though I don't believe he ever did the same thing for Goomba Color (not that it matters since you'd only use custom palettes on GB games anyway).