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Show HN: Game Bub – open-source FPGA retro emulation handheld
I’m excited to announce the project I’ve been working on for the last year and a half: Game Bub, an open-source FPGA based retro emulation handheld, with support for Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games. Play Video: Game Bub can play physical cartridges, as well as emulated cartridges using ROM files loaded from a microSD card. Game Bub also supports the Game Link Cable in both GB and GBA modes for multiplayer games. I designed the hardware with a number of bonus features, like video out (HDMI) via a custom dock, a rumble motor, real-time clock (for certain games). Additionally, the hardware is designed with extensibility in mind, allowing future software improvements to expand its capabilities.
This was sufficient to do most of my initial testing, but I later wrote an improved SPI receiver to run with an internal 200 MHz clock (from a PLL that turned on and off with the chip-select signal to save power), communicating with the rest of the system via a pair of FIFOs. For example, they might test what happens when you run an instruction that ARM calls “unpredictable”, or the exact number of cycles it takes to service an interrupt in specific scenarios, or the value of the “carry” flag after performing a multiplication. I have a long list of mostly minor changes to make to the MCU firmware: improving UI render performance, bits of polish like low battery notifications, eliminating display glitching when reloading the FPGA, and that sort of thing.
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