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SameBoy

SameBoy is an open source Game Boy (DMG) and Game Boy Color (CGB) emulator, written in portable C. It has a native Cocoa frontend for macOS, an SDL frontend for other operating systems, and a libretro core. It also includes a text-based debugger with an expression evaluator. Visit the website.

Features

Features common to both Cocoa and SDL versions:

Features currently supported only with the Cocoa version:

Read more.

Compatibility

SameBoy passes all of blargg's test ROMs, all of mooneye-gb's tests (Some tests require the original boot ROMs), and all of Wilbert Pol's tests. SameBoy should work with most games and demos, please report any broken ROM. The latest results for SameBoy's automatic tester are available here.

Contributing

SameBoy is an open-source project licensed under the Expat license (with an additional exception for the iOS folder), and you're welcome to contribute by creating issues, implementing new features, improving emulation accuracy and fixing existing open issues. You can read the contribution guidelines to make sure your contributions are as effective as possible.

Compilation

SameBoy requires the following tools and libraries to build:

On Windows, SameBoy also requires:

To compile, simply run make. The targets are:

You may also specify CONF=debug (default), CONF=release, CONF=native_release or CONF=fat_release to control optimization, symbols and multi-architectures. native_release is faster than release, but is optimized to the host's CPU and therefore is not portable. fat_release is exclusive to macOS and builds x86-64 and ARM64 fat binaries; this requires using a recent enough clang and macOS SDK using xcode-select, or setting them explicitly with CC= and SYSROOT=, respectively. All other configurations will build to your host architecture, except for the iOS targets. You may set BOOTROMS_DIR=... to a directory containing precompiled boot ROM files, otherwise the build system will compile and use SameBoy's own boot ROMs.

The SDL port will look for resource files with a path relative to executable and inside the directory specified by the DATA_DIR variable. If you are packaging SameBoy, you may wish to override this by setting the DATA_DIR variable during compilation to the target path of the directory containing all files (apart from the executable, that's not necessary) from the build/bin/SDL directory in the source tree. Make sure the variable ends with a / character. On FreeDesktop environments, DATA_DIR will default to /usr/local/share/sameboy/. PREFIX and DESTDIR follow their standard usage and default to an empty string an /usr/local, respectively

Linux, BSD, and other FreeDesktop users can run sudo make install to install SameBoy as both a GUI app and a command line tool.

SameBoy is compiled and tested on macOS, Ubuntu and 64-bit Windows 10.