Elm Town 40 – A Game Boy Emulator in Elm

Manuel Fuchs shares what he learned by taking on a very unusual Elm project: a Nintendo Game Boy emulator!

Thank you to our sponsors, Ellie, Culture Amp and Joel Clermont.

Special thanks to Xavier Ho (@Xavier_Ho) for editing and production of this episode!

Recording date: 2018-11-10

Guests

• Manuel Fuchs (@malax)

Show Notes

00:00 Show opening

01:58 Manuel's journey to Elm

07:09 Why a Game Boy emulator

• Tetris Effect
• video: Writing a Game Boy Emulator in Ruby

12:19 False assumptions and unexpected difficulties

18:37 Loading Game Boy ROM images as binary data

19:59 Breaking out of the Elm Architecture

22:30 Implementing a CPU instruction set in Elm

• Elmboy source code

25:46 Debugging and profiling

27:03 Throwing out types

31:49 Adding Pokemon compatibility

33:30 Readability, teaching and welcoming contributors

34:57 More performance optimisations

41:05 Elm + Game Boy = fun

• Try Elmboy