Stupid JavaScript Tricks: a Game Boy Advance Emulator

[Archaemic]

I wrote a GBA emulator a few months back.

In JavaScript.

You can thank me later.

http://jpfau.github.com/gbajs/

(By which I mean, this is totally useless and slow as fuck because IT'S A FUCKING GAME BOY ADVANCE RUNNING IN A WEB BROWSER)

[suit]

holy cow

get serious though make it compatible with multiple cores

[Sofox]

You've shown it to me before, but it's fricken awesome! Great job!

[Archaemic]

holy cow

get serious though make it compatible with multiple cores

I did. The graphics render on another thread.

[Shinmera]

Another instance of Atwood's Law.

[suit]

holy cow

get serious though make it compatible with multiple cores

I did. The graphics render on another thread.

Really? Running in Safari on a quad 2.7ghz i7 MBP Retina, it seemed to max out one core (the webkit process, content whatever it's called was at 25%) while the others lay idle. But the game ran at what felt like half-speed, so I felt if all the other cores were working it'd be a full speed emulator.

[Archaemic]

Well, I can't really distribute much of the load across cores due to the fact that most of the tasks are serial. Graphics were relatively easy, but even migrating things like sound...not so easy. The overhead in using Web Workers is pretty bad, actually.

PS: Try using the WebKit Nightlies from WebKit.org. They're a lot faster.

[Sz]

Emulation is painfully single-threaded in general (and so is javascript), so it's a tough bargain...

but still, I missed this and it's pretty fun.