Resources for Emulation Development

Developing emulators is a great side project and is one of the best ways to learn CPU architecture and design. This post is a collection of some good resources I've come across during the time I went down this rabbit hole.

I used to keep a specific bookmarks folder for emudev. Since then I had shared this list of resources as a document to many people — friends to whom I brought up the topic of emulation development and at talks I have given where I discussed about emulators. This blog post is to keep all my resources in an orderly manner. Going forward I will be updating this post with whatever I discover. Happy hacking!

The Basics

• codeslinger - A beginners guide to the art of emulation programming

• Emulator 101

• My talk about getting into emulator development at FOSSASIA Summit 2021

CHIP-8

• Emulation Basics: Write your own Chip 8 Emulator/Interpreter | moises' blog

• How to Create Your Very Own Chip-8 Emulator

• Cowgod's Chip-8 Technical Reference

• Building and understanding a Virtual Machine in 2hrs (CHIP-8 Emulator) - YouTube

• Building a CHIP-8 Emulator [C++] - Austin Morlan

• mattmik : Mastering CHIP-8

The Gameboy

• Why did I spend 1.5 months creating a Gameboy emulator? · tomek's blog

• Ben Wiser | Writing my first Gameboy Emulator

• JackTech (Amazing videos about the Gameboy architecture)

• gbdev/awesome-gbdev: A curated list of Game Boy development resources such as tools, docs, emulators, related projects and open-source ROMs.

• Meet the Game Boy Instruction Set - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

• The GameBoy Project

• Game Boy: Complete Technical Reference

• Introduction - DMG-01: How to Emulate a Game Boy

• Pan Docs Reference

• GameBoy CPU Manual

• POKEGB: a gameboy emulator that only plays Pokémon blue

• Imran Nazar: GameBoy Emulation in JavaScript: The CPU

• codeslinger.co.uk Gameboy reference

• Pan Docs - Everything you always wanted to know about the Gameboy (Different website than the pan docs given earlier)

• media.ccc.de - Oh Boy! Creating a Game Boy Emulator in Rust

• Game boy Architecture | A Practical Analysis

The Gameboy Advance

• Game Boy Advance Architecture | A Practical Analysis

• How to create a Gameboy Advance Emulator (GBA) in the browser with JavaScript | Our Code World

The NES

• NesDev

• NES Emulator from scratch (Playlist)

The Nintendo DS

• How games were made for the Nintendo DS

I sure had a lot of fun learning about the different hardware architectures and felt a new level of appreciation to how these gaming consoles work. I wish you all the best if you are thinking of building an console emulator as a side project!