My impressions of it so far are: Although this emulator is inferior, it's no slouch. There's no scaling feature like with LameBoy, but I have a DSi XL so I don't have to squint my eyes. Like LameBoy, the user can select their ROMs during gameplay using the shoulder buttons with no need to close the emulator. There doesn't seem to be any save state support, but I presume that'll come shortly. One feature I hope will come in a later version is keymapping. I really want to use Y as my primary fire button and B as jump.
This is by no means a comprehensive test of the emulator's capabilites, but I have tried a few of my favorite GB(C) games as well as some problematic games in LameBoy. Games that were problematic in LameBoy remained so in GameYob and some games LameBoy handled well GameYob also handled but at a lower speed.
1942 - Plays quite alright. No problems with this one.
Cannon Fodder - Runs slower than it does on LameBoy. GameYob has trouble with the 3D sections like LameBoy did, but it's considerably worse. Sound is still ass.
Duke Nukem - Ran as well as it did on LameBoy, but only at 40fps
Operation C - Played through the first stage with no problems.
Super R.C. Pro- Am - Title screen displays and opening music plays, but I cannot get to the Main Menu. Plays the intro which is more than LameBoy can do.
San Francisco Rush 2049 - The starting track looks like it's been covered by the ooze. This is another game infected with slowdown.
Shantae - I only played ~30 seconds of this game, it was too damn slow
Super Mario Land 2 - Plays about as well as LameBoy. No noticeable problems during my short time with it
Here's the author's post from the GBAtemp forums:
UPDATE: This is now open-source!
Hello gbatemp, this is my first post here and I'd like to share with you a project I've been working on for... technically, almost 2 years. But the actual time spent on it was more like 6 months. I call it... GameYob. It emulates GB/GBC games on a ds (no SGB support yet). Here's a summary of what it can do:
- Runs most original gb games fullspeed, and a number of double-speed gbc games as well (Wario Land 3 is quite playable, and the oracle games... almost). It's not as fast as lameboy, yet.
- Supports sound, saving, real-time clock (same format as lameboy), and roms of any size.
- Sound emulation is hit-and-miss... some games, like pokemon RBY (even pikachu's cry!) and GSC, sound excellent, while others have various issues.
- GBC Bios Support! (only in the latest builds) It looks for a file called "gbc_bios.bin" in the same directory as your rom. It should be 2304 (0x900) bytes big.
I know this will be a tough sell, since we already have lameboy, which I admit is mostly superior... for now. But, if for no other reason... do it for pikachu.
Download it and its source code from the github repository. A binary of latest build will always be available here. A few notes:
- Press R to open the menu.
- Press X to save your data to the filesystem.
- When you choose the "Load ROM" option, your game is saved automatically.
- It looks for roms in the "lameboy" directory by default, to make your life easier.
- Games which don't run at full speed are more prone to graphical glitches. You can turn on "Wait for Vblank" to avoid this, but your FPS will drop to about 30. It's better to just leave it off.
- Don't deactivate the "hblank" option. You've been warned.
