Interpreterception

The next project in the pipeline is a Game Boy emulator written in my own programming language. An interpreter within an interpreter and a stress test for the virtual machine and its functionality. It also opens the door for future optimizations because those are quite hard to do without a sizable program to test them on.

The heart of a console is its CPU. I decided to write a reference implementation in C++ and then translate it to drizzle on each milestone. That way, I can debug it without using the good old print method and know whether the reason it's not working is a mistake in the emulator or the drizzle machinery.

Getting it up and running was a tedious task. Emulating a complex instruction set processor lends itself to packing all opcodes into a giant switch statement and calling it a day. And that's why I ended up with 256 cases of pure fun. Looking back at the GBAs ARM7, the code was more elegant, but drizzle imposes some restrictions in terms of performance and features.

class GameBoy:
  def inc(value):
    value = (value + 1) & 0xFF
    this.set_f(value == 0, 0, (value & 0x0F) == 0x00, null)
    return value

  def and(other):
    this.a = this.a & other
    this.set_f(this.a == 0, 0, 1, 0)

  def xor(other):
    this.a = this.a ^ other
    this.set_f(this.a == 0, 0, 0, 0)

  def step_cpu():
    var opcode = this.read_byte_pc()
    switch opcode:
      case 0x04:  # INC B
        this.b = this.inc(this.b)
      case 0x41:  # LD B, C
        this.b = this.c
      case 0xA0:  # AND A, B
        this.and(this.b)
      case 0xA8:  # XOR A, B
        this.xor(this.b)

I tested it with the infamous blargg test ROMs, and it appears to work! The second test fails because I haven't implemented interrupts, but those are next in line.

01 - special              Passed
02 - interrupts EI        Failed #2
03 - op sp,hl             Passed
04 - op r,imm             Passed
05 - op rp                Passed
06 - ld r,r               Passed
07 - jr,jp,call,ret,rst   Passed
08 - misc instrs          Passed
09 - op r,r               Passed
10 - bit ops              Passed
11 - op a,(hl)            Passed