The State of Gameboy Emulation

welcome everybody to the first episode of the state of the series where we go over the current emulation state of a console today we'll be covering the original Game Boy so let's look at the system and break down some of its specs this console is commonly referred to as a DMG Game Boy where DMG stands for dot matrix game this is referring to the technology that was used for its screen dot matrix screens consisted of a series of lights that could be turned on or off to display images the game boy's display had an aspect ratio of 10x9 with a resolution of 160 by 144 pixels which made its screen very close to square shaped the pixel art on this display was clearly defined due to its grid overlay which is distinct from other displays as it's merely implied rather than being explicit on other consoles you get black vertical and horizontal lines that clearly Define a grid whereas on the DMG Game Boy pixels are spaced so as to give the illusion of a grid it's essentially created by the space between pixels this white grid as I'll be calling it is one of the most identifying features of the DMG Game Boy and I gotta say people really love their grids on these old game boys it's one of the features that a lot of the pixel purists really love to have the Game Boy could only display four shades of green which meant that games were monochromatic the other Game Boy model of this generation the Game Boy Pocket could only display four Shades of Black and thus continued the monochrome aesthetic both of these systems had a contrast wheel which could be turned to adjust the game's contrast at its upper extreme this wheel brightened all the pixels to the lightest shade of green available while at the Other Extreme it did the exact opposite and darkened the pixels to the darkest shade of green available the contrast wheel was there to adjust the Game Boy in different lighting conditions and make images more visible this was necessary because the DMG had poor viewing angles I mean if you're not under a pretty decent light source it's pretty difficult to see what's going on in the screen I usually play under a really bright lamp and that tends to illuminate the image pretty well but I'm pretty sure this console was designed to play in direct sunlight since kids are always outside thankfully the Game Boy Pocket had much better viewing angles and its screen was a much needed upgrade another downside of the Dom Matrix screen was its prevalent ghosting effect which was caused by the display's low refresh rate it typically happened with rapid moving images and caused them to appear blurry you can very clearly see it in Tetris when holding down the d-pad to make a piece to send quicker despite these shortcomings I consistently find myself coming back to this console I think it just has that nostalgic retro feel that honestly once you put an IPS screen on these it it loses something and apart from that I really love the buttons on these they're very clicky and Squishy and it's just one of my favorite consoles to come back to speaking of buttons did you know this console only had a d-pad and it's four face buttons there were no l and R buttons like we see in the Game Boy Advance and DS consoles what we did get however was a headphone jack and an external connection Port which could be used for the Link cable and to power accessories there was also an AC input Port that could be used to power the Game Boy without the need of batteries but if you did want to use batteries you would require a whopping four Double A's but thankfully the console did have a battery life of 15 hours which is massive by today's standards games on this system came in cartridge form and were inserted into a slot in the back upon powering the Game Boy a plastic tab would slide over this divot in the game cartridge and prevent it from being removed while the system was on the tab may have also been there to prevent you from playing bootleg games on this game boy as any cartridge that isn't the right shape wouldn't work on the system when games are read properly however the Nintendo logo will be seen descending from the top of the screen Every Game Boy console featured a startup animation similar to this and it's one of those features that makes these systems so recognizable despite original Game Boy games being programmed to be played in black and white 12 color palettes are available when these games are inserted into a Game Boy Color or Game Boy Advance these pallets can be accessed by pressing the correct button combination during the Game Boy boot up pressing up gives us Brown pressing down gives us pale yellow pressing left gives us blue pressing right gives a screen pressing up and a gives us red pressing down in a gives us orange pressing left and a gives us dark blue pressing right in a gives us dark green pressing up and B gives us dark brown pressing down in V gives us yellow pressing left and B gives us gray and finally pressing right in B gives us reverse what you're going to want to do is right when you turn the Game Boy on you're going to want to press the correct button combination and just clicking the buttons allows you to browse through the different color palettes that are available similarly the SNES is super Game Boy also featured color palettes and even allowed players to make their own with all these features out of the way let's see how well emulation can recreate them when it comes to emulating a console that's been around for decades you of course have a ton of options but I'll mainly be focusing on retroarc for a number of reasons retrowork is a front end for emulators that will keep all your ROMs neatly organized and is highly compatible with controllers in fact I'm pretty sure retroarch's menu navigation was programmed with controllers in mind as navigating the menu with a mouse is extremely clunky retroarch not only covers the DMG Game Boy but just about every system you'd like to emulate with the exception of some of the more modern ones it does this with its collection of cores which are individual emulators for a specific console you'll regularly find more than one core for each system with the Game Boy itself having several so why pick retroarch over a standalone emulator well for one the menu interface itself which easily lets you browse your collection of ROMs there are various different themes for the interface but my personal favorite is the xmb menu because it takes me back to playing on the PS3 you also get these cool thumbnails which can display your game's box art furthermore every single thing in retro art can be accessed with a controller which makes it perfect for connecting to a TV as you won't ever have to get up and mess with your computer and you'll also find that your controller is already mapped for you so if you're a dummy like me this is perfect also retroarch has a full screen feature that won't distort your image's aspect ratio on the other hand when playing on a standalone emulator you'll notice that many of the features I mentioned here are missing everything here is standardized throughout each console meaning that Game Boy games will have the exact same hotkeys as Super Nintendo games or any other game games you play all of these hotkeys can also be triggered with your controller and believe me a lot of really prominent Standalone emulators don't let you do this retroworks hotkeys however make all of the features very accessible and easy to use your save States fast forward slow motion rewind toggle FPS full screen Etc all of these and more can be accessed with the Press of a button on your controller the way it works is that you need to press a button to activate your hotkeys and I have this set to select so whenever I press select I can access all my hotkeys I have my save state to R1 and my load state to L1 so I just need to press select and R1 to make a Save State and select an L1 to load estate and you have the freedom to map your hotkeys however you want so it's really convenient now am I saying that you have to use retroarch and that it's the perfect program absolutely not if we look at the Gambit Standalone emulator for example we'll notice that it has one big feature that's glaringly missing from Red work this being that you can create your own color palettes in Gambit and it's actually a fairly robust system you can make an individual palette for the background and Sprites one and two one of these Sprites is for your own player character and the other one is for enemies or other characters this is a feature that I really wish retrowark had but it's not enough to make me switch to the Standalone emulator if you however value the creation of color palettes over the convenience of retroarch then you can definitely take this route no matter what emulator you choose though you'll have to deal with scaling the game boy's image to the display you're using given that the system's aspect ratio was 10x9 the image won't fill your entire 16x9 or even 16x10 display this is where scaling comes into play and allows us to drastically increase the game boys 160 by 144 resolution to prevent pixel Distortion integer scaling is commonly used here and it's a method of upscaling an image only by integer factors such as two times three times four times and so on but what does this mean exactly well let's look at Link's Overworld sprite from Link's Awakening the original Sprite is contained pretty well on a 16 by 16 pixel canvas and if we do a two times integer upscale on it you'll see that each pixel now has four pixels within it a two times integer scale is the smallest amount we can upscale an image by and even this scale drastically increases our pixel density the problem here however is that you can only upscale an image so much before it's too big for your screen therefore if you want a perfect integer skill you'll always end up with black border surrounding your screen now one way you can make use of the screen space is to apply an on-screen overlay the gb.cfg overlay has that retro look while making use of your entire screen if you don't like overlays however here's some other options first you can turn on overscale which makes your image the next highest integer say for example that your screen can safely display a 3X integer scale while this overscale feature will force the image to a 4X scale but this does mean that some of the top and bottom of the image will be cut off if you don't want your screen to be cut off you can instead just turn integer scaling off which allows your image to fill up the screen vertically but won't be a perfect integer scale now follow this integer scaling mumbo jumbo is giving you a headache and you just want to fill up your screen then just turn integer scaling off go to aspect ratio and select full this will force the image to fill up the entirety of your screen and won't cut off any of the pixels from the top and bottom after you've gotten your scaling situation figured out you're going to want to decide which retroar core to play on I've tried several for the DMG Game Boy and of these the Gambit core has set out to me as the best this core has the awesome feature of allowing you to assign a button to switch between color palettes I have this assigned to the front shoulder buttons where L1 goes to the previous color palette while R1 goes to the next color palette my only gripe here is that you can't browse through them quickly as holding down the hotkey button is actually slower than tapping it rapidly you also get access to all 12 of The Game Boy colors palettes and you can flip through them with the Press of a button this is a massive improvement over playing on the original console as there you have to turn the console off to switch color palettes all the super Game Boy palettes are here too but you unfortunately can't create new ones you do however get a ton of fan made palettes and I prefer a lot of these over the Game Boy Color and super Game Boy palettes like they have a palette for almost everything I'm talking a virtual boy palette a Pip Boy palette uh the Game Boy kiosk palette and even a freaking missing no palette so if you know what missing though is you'll you'll realize how absurd that is my favorites here though are the easy greens gray green mix gold bar and vaporwave vaporwave is very awesome this core also remembers which color palette you previously used meaning you won't have to set it every time you boot up a game like you do on the GBC apart from the palettes I just mentioned there are also three others that attempt to replicate the screens of each first generation Game Boy console these are the DMG Game Boy Pocket and Game Boy Light palettes the first here is your typical four shades of green and looks pretty close to the real thing the second gives you four Shades of Black to replicate the Game Boy Pocket and the last one has the Game Boy lights teal color you'll notice that none of these palettes have a grid and later we'll get into how you can get one the Gambit core also has some interesting features like color correction which attempts to reproduce the washed out colors of the Game Boy Color it does a pretty good job but I prefer to keep it turned off for more vibrant colors there's also inner frame blending which simulates the ghosting effect that I talked about earlier but I honestly don't know why anybody would want to play with this one but it's here I guess I briefly want to mention the same boycore for accuracy's sake as it has one cool feature that really stood out to me as a mock boot up sequence that's here to replicate the game boys boot up screen rather than saying Game Boy though it says same boy and this is probably for copyright reasons if you put the emulator in Game Boy Color mode then you you can actually press the button combinations to pick a color palette which is just like you would on the console you cannot however switch between color palettes while in a game like you can on Gambit the biggest issue I've had though is this visual glitch where a bunch of the screens pixels are missing this only happens on GBC mode and I haven't found a way to fix it even updating the core did nothing maybe it's just me experiencing this issue and you guys can let me know but as of now I wouldn't recommend using the same boycore after picking our retro art core we may want to consider using a Shader or filter both of these affect the game's graphics and can be used to reproduce a ton of different effects filters generally put more strain on your system but that doesn't necessarily mean they're better with shaders the first thing we can do is replicate the original DMG screen if you don't want a grid but still want those nice four shades of green then you can use the GB palette DMG Shader I'm more fond of the Game Boy Shader however as it has that iconic white grid that the original screen had and it looks awesome both of these shaders can be found by going to shaders glsl and then handheld big disclaimer here though keep in mind that your shaders and your color palettes are two different things and the fact that you have a Shader on will not disable your color palette so for the most neutral picture I'd recommend selecting the grayscale palette when using either of these shaders some other shaders that might pique your interest are the CRT shaders which add those retro scan lines to your image CRT aperture adds scan lines without curving the image while CRT consumer gives you the iconic CRT Bend I personally love CRT consumer on the SNES but I'm not the biggest fan of it on the game boy there's just something about it that looks off to me but if you're a big CRT person then you should definitely give it a try next I'm going to talk about some shaders that might get me in trouble with a more hardcore retro crowd and don't get me wrong I do think these ruin the look of retro games but for the sake of being thorough I'm going to have to mention them what I'm referring to are the scale FX shaders which essentially remove pixels by smoothing them out they're pretty much here for people who don't want to play retro games because they're too pixely these shaders seem to work better on the NES and SNES than they do on the game boy and that's probably because of the higher resolution on those consoles to use the shaders you'll have to switch your video driver to GL core or Vulcan as slang shaders are not available for the staff energy L driver you can do this in the video settings by the way then you're going to want to open slang shaders go to scale FX and select the 9x Shader which seems to be the best out of the bunch also I'm genuinely curious what you guys think of this effect so let me know in the comments in terms of filters there's just one I want to point out and it's the dot matrix three times GB DMG query filter which Jesus Christ has such a long name this filter gives you a simple pixel grid while still allowing you to select your own color palette this one is good for people that want a pixel grid but don't want the green DMG aesthetic and it's more appealing to me than the CRT Shader now with shaders and filters out of the way that just about wraps up all of retroar's features worth mentioning oh so how does the state of Game Boy emulation actually fare well first let's consider compatibility and how much of the consoles Library we're able to emulate Game Boy emulation gets a 10 out of 10 here as we're able to emulate just about everything except stuff like the Game Boy camera and Game Boy Pocket sonar next is our Improvement score does emulating the system improve the user experience I'm giving it a 7 out of 10 here as the whole color palette thing is awesome but other than that it's the same experience the accuracy score how accurate is our emulation well the only Quirk here is that we probably aren't using a dot matrix screen but other than that it's pretty damn accurate 9 out of 10. lastly comes our overall user experience and honestly if you're using retroarch this is as good as it gets there's a ton of great features that make emulating the system a treat 10 out of 10. well I hope you guys enjoyed my first episode of the state of I'm planning to cover every console that we can currently emulate but if there's a specific system you guys want to see first please let me know in the comments thank you all for watching

Channel: Godpuu

Views: 16,883

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Id: vrSr11aPrTs

Length: 17min 27sec (1047 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2023