SharpBoy jest nowym emulatorem konsolki NINTENDO GameBoy i Color GameBoy, niestety sformułowanie nowy nie jest najlepszą nobilitacją - program został napisany w C#, wymaga biblioteki SlimDX znaczy się czerpie garściami z nowych narzędzi programistycznych, które pod starszymi systemami średnio się sprawdzają.
Nowa wersja wspiera spakowane archiwa (zip), poprawę mechanizmu frameskippingu (omijanie klatek celem podniesienia prędkości działania na starych konstrukcji) i przedewszystkim parę zmian w kodzie, które powinny pozwolić na odpalenie niektórych programów, które do tej pory nie chciały poprawnie działać z emulatorami.
v0.3 (May 11th 2011)
- Switched rendering from using SlimDX to OpenTK, SlimDX Runtimes no longer needed; video filtering now selectable
- GBC DMA copy operations improved, fixes certain DMA transfers spanning different areas of memory
- Improved support for "undocumented" I/O registers, Demotronic Demo no longer detects the emulator and now runs with some glitches
- Above change, coupled with improved graphics emulation, also fixed colorization of monochrome games via the CGB bootstrap ROM
- Preliminary MBC emulation for Pocket Camera / Game Boy Camera; no actual camera support
- Frame skipping and speed-up functionality implemented
- ROMs can now be loaded from ZIP archives (using the DotNetZip library); recent ROM history added to menu
v0.2 (April 03rd 2011)
- GBC DMA emulation fixed, transfer length wasn't being calculated correctly; fixes incorrect and missing graphics in some games
- LCDC emulation improved, fixes flickering and slowdown in certain games and demos
- MBC5 ROM bank select fixed; many more Game Boy Color games now start and/or run further
- Timing of screen drawing improved, which results in less graphical glitches with ex. flickering sprites for pseudo-transparency
- Temporary hack added to allow the Zelda: Oracle games to boot correctly, coupled with the above fixes they now go in-game
- DMG and CGB bootstrap ROMs now supported; have to be named DMG_ROM.bin and CGB_ROM.bin and enabled via the menu
- Manual system type selection implemented, emulator can now be forced to run in GB or GBC mode (not complete yet)
- Controls can be changed via the GUI
- Other minor GUI and usability improvements (ex. path to last ROM image run is saved to config.xml)
v0.1a (March 30th 2011)
- Bugfix release, fixed possible crashes at startup
Notes and bugs:
- Emulation is still incomplete and has bugs, especially with GBC games
- No sound, serial link, SGB, etc. for now
- No documentation yet either; controls cannot be changed from within the program (edit config.xml manually after first run)
- GUI has some quirks (ex. window resizing), FPS limit and counter aren't accurate
- Debugger slows down emulation speed considerably, needs some serious optimization
- Probably more...
- ...and despite this, there's a bunch of playable games: