Yet another play-in your browser thing that gives zero f's about the y/z key switch on German keyboard layouts
Just added Dvorak overrides.
Gameboy color emulator entirely in Javascript
31–35 of 35 posts
Re: Gameboy color emulator entirely in Javascript
#32On the one hand, this is pretty cool. On the other hand, I'm not sure the best argument for "look how far JavaScript has come" is to use it to do things that native code was doing 13 years ago. On the third hand, this has been around for like a year now. I'm fairly shocked that Nintendo hasn't come down on him yet for hosting commercial ROMs in this thing, they have a history of non-tolerance of these sorts of things…
The point isn't the code, it's the emulation of the hardware the code runs on. A processor, ram, display and sound are being emulated inside a browser by JavaScript, and we can use this to run a binary almost perfectly. That is what is amazing here, not the ability to play tetris!
Meanwhile, native code was emulating an NES at full speed on a 60Mhz Pentium 1 back in 1997. http://bloodlust.zophar.net/NESticle/nes.html Its nice that we can finally do in browsers what required assembly 14 years prior, but it's not exactly satisfying...
Re: Gameboy color emulator entirely in Javascript
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
The spotlight here goes to the browser, and what this means to it's future. Not what you can do with native code.
> The spotlight here goes to the browser, and what this means to it's future. It probably means that the web browser's future is to be an awesome web browser.
Which is great because everybody has a browser and is capable of updating it.
Re: Gameboy color emulator entirely in Javascript
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, emulating a machine of this complexity was beyond imagination when gameboy came out. On the other hand, Virtualbox can emulate much more complicate machines. On the other hand, this one lives entirely and safely inside your browser.
> Virtualbox can emulate much more complicate machines. Virtualbox does not emulate anything, it uses the CPU's virtualization extensions and the code runs natively on the CPU.
What did VMWare do prior to "virtualization extensions" ?
Re: Gameboy color emulator entirely in Javascript
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Virtualbox can emulate much more complicate machines. Virtualbox does not emulate anything, it uses the CPU's virtualization extensions and the code runs natively on the CPU.
What did VMWare do prior to "virtualization extensions" ?
Virtualization without extensions is possible, but tricky on x86. VMWare has historically used binary translation to deal with the tricky bits. (I.e. go through the binary before you run it, look for instructions that don't virtualize properly, replace them with sequences that can be virtualized and either do the same thing, or trap into the virtual machine monitor.)