Super Mario Brothers GameBoy (and all GameBoy games) ported to HTML5

http://www.grantgalitz.org/SuperMarioBros/

by paulirish • 15 years ago

162 45 15 years ago

paulirish• 15 years ago

The parent link is Super Mario Bros running fullscreen. It runs best in FF4, the audio in Chrome can be a little choppy. It will suck in FF3.6 and everything else, probably. It uses the (very) experiemental Web Audio API in webkit and the Audio Data API in FF4; it has a fallback to standard HTML5 Audio(), which has known performance issues everywhere.

You can view the full emulator here: http://www.grantgalitz.org/gameboy/

It's all on github: https://github.com/grantgalitz/GameBoy-Online

And a few other ROMS are available for play now:

* http://www.grantgalitz.org/zelda/

* http://www.grantgalitz.org/pokemon/

daeken2• 15 years ago

Nice work! As it stands, you seem to be doing pure interpretation for the CPU; have you considered dynamic recompilation? You can see this in practice for the 6502 here: https://github.com/daeken/Dyna6502Asm

In essence, you accumulate instructions in basic blocks and turn them into functions, which are then 'executed' (meaning turned into function objects) and then cached. In your case it becomes a little more complex as you do cycle timing, interrupts, etc, but there's no reason you can't bake this into your basic block functions. This drastically increases the performance of CPU emulation, while maintaining the same high quality.

If you're interested in doing this and/or have any questions, feel free to contact me.

grantg11• 15 years ago

You might want to talk to me then (Look at the user name on the github repo. ;) ). The DMG/CGB CPU needs to be emulated with clock-cycle accuracy though, so dynarec would be very difficult.

P.S.: Here's another game - http://www.grantgalitz.org/SuperMarioLand2/

jacoblyles• 15 years ago

HTML5 audio in Chrome is not at a point where it can be used for game sound effects yet. Rewinding and restarting a sound doesn't work consistently, and creating new Audio() objects too quickly crashes the tab. FF4 is great, though. Star my Chromium bug reports if you want this fixed. http://bit.ly/g9KJNz http://bit.ly/hSXvOj

ars• 15 years ago

BTW, just a reminder not to use shortened urls here - even if they are very long. Those urls are actually:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=71322&... http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=71323&...

And you if you had wanted them shorter just remove everything after the id field.

aw3c2• 15 years ago

Nothing is ported to HTML5, you made a emulator though. Porting != emulating!

Great work!

aforty2• 15 years ago

The audio is messed up for me on SMB using Chrome on a MBR running OSX. Anyone else?

Dilpil• 15 years ago

Horrid sound glitches on mozilla in windows 7 as well.

grantg11• 15 years ago

I'm guessing you're not using Firefox 4 then, I take it?

Edit: Firefox 4 on linux has a GC issue, not my fault.

grantg11• 15 years ago

Try going to about:flags and enabling web audio (if you have that option.). Doing so will allow you to use native audio instead of data uri generation in real time. Kind of like mozAudio, but for webkit.

aforty2• 15 years ago

Hmm, enabling web audio API disabled the sound completely. Oh well. Still, a very cool emulator!

andrewcamel• 15 years ago

Same setup, same issue.

grantg11• 15 years ago

Use Firefox 4 for OSX and all will be resolved (I have Snow Leopard on a MacBook Pro, so it better work well on your Mac too). :P

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/

arange• 15 years ago

wow and it runs just as fast as it did back then too!

estel• 15 years ago

There's also JSNES: http://benfirshman.com/projects/jsnes/ which probably benefits from not stretching to fullscreen.

wzdd• 15 years ago

Impressively, it runs (very slowly) to the point of showing a title screen on an HTC Desire, but then I can't figure out how to send input.

makmanalp• 15 years ago

If you want to read on about how to go about building one of these, check out my friend Imran Nazar's very detailed jsgb article series:

http://imrannazar.com/GameBoy-Emulation-in-JavaScript

Also, the source code:

https://github.com/Two9A/jsGB

JonnieCache• 15 years ago

I can vouch for the quality of these tutorials. It actually puts emulation within easy reach of novice programmers, as unlikely as that may sound.

Give it a go!

jerf• 15 years ago

Without criticism of this particular project or site intended, I am surprised at the number of these emulation sites running commercial ROMs popping up without action being taken by Nintendo et al. Someone's going to have an example made out of them.

grantg, if you're just trying to show off an emulator but aren't ready to be the example, may I suggest finding a free Gameboy game to show off instead? I know there are actually-free games for many other consoles, I presume there are for the gameboy as well.

wladimir• 15 years ago

The game companies generally don't care about the really old stuff. They don't see much (if any) commercial value in them anymore.

Don't try to emulate their latest or one-to-latest console though.

wesley• 15 years ago

Heh, nintendo certainly does. They are actively reselling these games in the wii / 3DS online stores. Expect a takedown notice soon.

zandorg• 15 years ago

The UK company Codemasters takes a heavy handed approach to piracy, of 1986-era ZX Spectrum games!

grantg11• 15 years ago

I took down the violating pages.

I put up a freeware ROM test page - http://www.grantgalitz.org/gbc_demo/

w1ntermute• 15 years ago

Input doesn't seem to be working with Firefox 4 beta 12 on Linux...I tried the shortcuts listed under "Instructions" on http://www.grantgalitz.org/gameboy/ to no avail.

zcid• 15 years ago

Running Iceweasel 4 beta 12 here and it is running fine on my Debian system.

determinobot• 15 years ago

Sounds cool, tried it on my Droid, but unfortunately it runs at something like 0.25 frames per second.

guigui• 15 years ago

Very nice work.

Too bad webkit browsers don't allow to turn off image smoothing like Firefox does, which makes true pixel art impossible. I'd love to see support for nearest-neighbor resampling included in the future versions of Chrome/Safari.

grantg11• 15 years ago

+1 -webkit-crisp-edges or crisp-edges

See -moz-crisp-edges @ https://developer.mozilla.org/en/css/image-rendering

alxp2• 15 years ago

What the what I'm walking backwards?? What crazy magic is this? Super Mario Bros. should be frozen in time exactly as I remember them, damnit.

alxp2• 15 years ago

Oh nevermind, it's just an artifact of the smaller viewport.

I still want you kids off my lawn, though.

ciupicri• 15 years ago

How do I get past the menu? I'm using epiphany-2.30.6-1.fc14.x86_64 which is powered by WebKit.

grantg11• 15 years ago

For anyone interested in seeing this run well in a safari build on mac, please see http://chromium.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/audio/bin/W...

It's a webkit/safari build with web audio in it, so audio is perfect as hell in it. :)

And for firefox, just get firefox 4 (god no, not 3.6!).

blub• 15 years ago

I'm currently reading Masters of Doom, and I can't help but chuckle: John Carmack was doing this in 1990 on the PC platform. Back then it was considered too slow to do side-scrolling.

grantgalitz• 15 years ago

I removed these pages because others here were right, in that I shouldn't be providing the ROMs, but the users themselves instead providing them. You can still use the emulator, just go to http://www.grantgalitz.org/gameboy/ and load in your own ROM files.

ljf2• 15 years ago

Anyone else seeing the site down? Or just me? Can't get to link or parent site.

grantg11• 15 years ago

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2268214

I took it down because the others posting about potential problems are right, so in order to use the emulator go to http://www.grantgalitz.org/gameboy/ and load in your OWN ROM files. Before I was providing the for you, but due to legalities, I am forcing you to provide your own. I didn't get a takedown notice, but I definitely don't want to get one, sorry for the inconvenience. :P

ljf2• 15 years ago

Thanks for letting me know. Great tool though.

Super Mario Brothers GameBoy (and all GameBoy games) ported to HTML5

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