Changes

Jump to navigation Jump to search

Game Boy/Game Boy Color emulators

4 bytes added, 00:00, 25 December 2022
m
Unlicensed mappers: lessened profanity
Much like the NES, the Game Boy (and by extension, the Game Boy Color) used '''Memory Bank Controllers''' (MBC) (called MMCs on the NES) and also known informally as '''mappers''', to go beyond the restrictive initial hardware specifications. Nevertheless, Nintendo was much more careful to standardize their specifications to just a small number of possible mappers. Moreover, Game Boy ROMs now included an official internal header mandated by Nintendo that included the correct MMC type. This meant that for the officially licensed games, these mappers proved to be rarely a problem... with some notable unimplemented exceptions: Net de Get's MBC6 that offered downloadable content off the internet, and the MMM01 footer used for some official multi-cart games, among others.
However, shit hits the fan it doesn't get better when it comes to '''unlicensed games''', since they didn't necessarily respect Nintendo's specifications about how a given mapper type should handle its memory and behave in general, and internal headers were often filled with erroneous data to hinder dumping and emulation efforts. Some emulators like MESS and [http://hhug.me/?tags=hhugboy hhugboy] try to emulate that behavior with various degrees of success ([http://hhug.me/dump/ Compatibility List]). The hhugboy project also proposed a similar solution to iNES for this mapper problem, as the [http://hhug.me/gbx/1.0 gbx ROM format] that appends a footer with extra information needed for some unlicensed games. However, this format, much less unlicensed hardware quirks, isn't widely adopted aside from tentative [https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba/blob/master/README.md#game-boy-mappers mGBA support].
==Hardware features==
51
edits

Navigation menu