Would anyone here assert that there's any particular programming language that's better for writing emulators, virtual machines, bytecode interpreters, etc?
Where, when I say "better", I'm not so much talking about getting results that are particularly efficient/performant; nor in making fewer implementation errors... but more in terms of the experience of implementing an emulator in this particular language, being more rewarding, intuitive, and/or teaching you more about both emulators and the language.
I ask because I know that this sort of language exists in other domains. Erlang, for example, is particularly rewarding to implement a "soft-realtime nine-nines-of-uptime distributed system" in. The language, its execution semantics, its runtime, and its core libraries, were all co-designed to address this particular problem domain. Using Erlang "for what it's for" can thus teach you a lot about distributed systems (due to the language/runtime/etc guiding your hand toward its own idiomatic answers to distributed-systems problems — which usually are "best practice" solutions in theory as well); and can lead you to a much-deeper understanding of Erlang (exploring all its corners, discovering all the places where the language designers considered the problems you'd be having and set you up for success) than you'd get by trying to use it to solve problems in some other domain.
Is there a language like that... but where the "problem domain" that the language's designers were targeting, was "describing machines in code"?
grg0 · 21m ago
Haskell excels at DSLs and the sort of data manipulation needed in compilers. OCaml, Lisp, and really any language with support for ADTs and such things do the trick as well. You can even try hard with modern C++ and variant types and such, but it won't be as pretty.
Of course, if you actually want to run games on the emulator, C or C++ is where the game is. I suppose Rust would work too, but I can't speak much for its low-level memory manipulation.
wk_end · 8m ago
Haskell and OCaml are excellent for compilers, because - as you suggest - you end up building, walking, and transforming tree data structures where sum types are really useful. Lisp is an odd suggestion there, as it doesn’t really have any built-in support for this sort of thing.
At any rate, that’s not really the case when building an emulator or bytecode interpreter. And Haskell ends up being mostly a liability here, because most work is just going to be imperatively modifying your virtual machine’s state.
alaaalawi · 16m ago
one of the options for fast iterations would be Forth. in its circles, it famous for generation targets and cross compiling between archs.
seaech the net you shold find plenty.
johnnyjeans · 1h ago
sml, specifically the MLTon dialect. It's good for all the same reasons ocaml is good, it's just a much better version of the ML-language in my opinion.
I think the only thing that ocaml has that I miss in sml is applicative functors, but in the end that just translates to slightly different module styles.
wk_end · 57m ago
Can you expand on what makes SML better, in your eyes, than OCaml?
IMO: it's certainly "simpler" and "cleaner" (although it's been a while but IIRC the treatment of things like equality and arithmetic is hacky in its own way), which I think causes some people to prefer SML over aesthetics, but TBH I feel like many of OCaml's features missing in SML are quite useful. You mentioned applicative functors, but there's also things like labelled arguments, polymorphic variants, GADTs, even the much-maligned object system that have their place. Is there anything SML really brings to the table besides the omission of features like this?
johnnyjeans · 2m ago
> the treatment of things like equality and arithmetic is hacky in its own way
mlton allows you to use a keyword to get the same facility for function overloading that is used for addition and equality. it's disabled by default for hygienic reasons, function overloading shouldn't be abused.
generally speaking if my functions are large enough for this to matter, i'd rather be passing around refs to structures so refactoring is easier.
> polymorphic variants
haven't really missed them.
> GADTs
afaik being able to store functors inside of modules would fix this (and I think sml/nj supports this), but SML's type system is more than capable of expressing virtual machines in a comfortable way with normal ADTs. if i wanted to get that cute with the type system, i'd probably go the whole country mile and reach for idris.
> even the much-maligned object system that have their place
never used it.
> Is there anything SML really brings to the table besides the omission of features like this?
mlton is whole-program optimizing (and very good at it)[1], has a much better FFI[2][3], is much less opinionated as a language, and the parallelism is about 30 years ahead[4]. the most important feature to me is that sml is more comfortable to use over ocaml. being nicer syntactically matters, and that increases in proportion with the amount of code you have to read and write. generally speaking, that splicitly in sml translates to a lot more mechanical sympathy.
all of these things combine for me, as an engineer, to what's fundamentally a more pragmatic language. the difference between sml and ocaml is not unlike the difference between edinburgh prolog and marseille prolog (but popularity and influence is reversed.) there is a particular quirkiness to french tastes in programming languages, not unlike their cars.
Assuming we're talking about a pure interpreter, pretty much anything that makes it straightforward to work with bytes and/or arrays is going to work fine. I probably wouldn't recommend Haskell, just because most operations are going to involve imperatively mutating the state of the machine, so pure FP won't win you much.
The basic process of interpretation is just: "read an opcode, then dispatch on it". You'll probably have some memory address space to maintain. And that's kind of it? Most languages can do that fine. So your preference should be based on just about everything else: how comfortable are you using it, how much do you like its abilities to interface with your host platform, how much do you like type checking, and so on.
foobiekr · 1h ago
C is probably the best language for this.
filleduchaos · 47m ago
I quite frankly disagree. From personal experience I don't think there's any mainstream programming language that in itself teaches you anything much about emulating systems like the Game Boy or NES - in fact, I'd go so far as to say that none of them even at least yield elegant and accurate implementations.
People write "production-grade" emulators in C because it's fast, not because it's uniquely suited to the domain as a language.
chickenzzzzu · 2h ago
C89
numlock86 · 2h ago
Cool. The demo runs way too fast, though. The throttle checkbox doesn't really change it. Unchecking it, if anything, makes it run slower. It runs at 240 fps with throttle and at 180 fps without. With the throttle checbox active one second are already about four seconds in the emulator. I suspect this is related to the screen refresh rate, which is 240Hz in my case.
chickenzzzzu · 2h ago
probably they are calling requestAnimationFrame() and then not accounting for deltaTime?
le-mark · 6h ago
This is a very nice write up of not only Ocaml but also gameboy emulator implementation. Great job and thank you to the author!
As an aside I’ve always thought it would be awesome to create a single page app with an assembler editor and assembler/linker/loader to enable doing gameboy homebrew in the browser. I think it would be a great, accessible embedded development teaching opportunity.
I know it’s a long shot, but does anyone know of a tutorial for the sound of a game boy emulator? Most of these tutorials never cover that piece and when I try it on my own I find it hard to properly implement or even understand the reference material well enough to implement on my own.
t0mek · 4h ago
Not a tutorial per-se, but here are 2 slides describing how I've done it:
Essentially, there are 4 channels, each providing a number 0-15 on every tick. Emulator should mix them together (arithmetic average), scale up to 0-255 and feed to the sound buffer, adjusting the tick rate (4.19MHz) to the sound output rate (e.g.: 22 kHz) - taking every ~190 value (4.19MHz / 22 kHz) is a good start.
Now the 0..15 value that should be produced by each channel depends on its characteristics, but it's well documented:
Channels 1 and 2 produce square waves, so a bunch of low (0) and high (15) values, with optional volume envelope (gradually going down from 15 to 0 on the "high" part of the square) and frequency sweep (alternating 0s and 15s slower or faster).
Channel 3 allows an arbitrary waveform, read from the memory.
Channel 4 is a random noise, generated by the LSFR.
Beautiful write-up! Thanks for sharing this. I want to write a game boy emulator in Rust and your blogpost really inspired me to kick this off. I’m bookmarking this.
noobcoder · 5h ago
ah nice ! great use of functors, GADTs
I wanna compare a CHIP 8 or NES emulator or port CAMLBOY to WASM using ocaml-wasm
hydroxideOH- · 2h ago
It should already be possible to run CAMLBOY on WASM because of the new WASM backend of js_of_ocaml (wasm_of_ocaml).
Where, when I say "better", I'm not so much talking about getting results that are particularly efficient/performant; nor in making fewer implementation errors... but more in terms of the experience of implementing an emulator in this particular language, being more rewarding, intuitive, and/or teaching you more about both emulators and the language.
I ask because I know that this sort of language exists in other domains. Erlang, for example, is particularly rewarding to implement a "soft-realtime nine-nines-of-uptime distributed system" in. The language, its execution semantics, its runtime, and its core libraries, were all co-designed to address this particular problem domain. Using Erlang "for what it's for" can thus teach you a lot about distributed systems (due to the language/runtime/etc guiding your hand toward its own idiomatic answers to distributed-systems problems — which usually are "best practice" solutions in theory as well); and can lead you to a much-deeper understanding of Erlang (exploring all its corners, discovering all the places where the language designers considered the problems you'd be having and set you up for success) than you'd get by trying to use it to solve problems in some other domain.
Is there a language like that... but where the "problem domain" that the language's designers were targeting, was "describing machines in code"?
Of course, if you actually want to run games on the emulator, C or C++ is where the game is. I suppose Rust would work too, but I can't speak much for its low-level memory manipulation.
At any rate, that’s not really the case when building an emulator or bytecode interpreter. And Haskell ends up being mostly a liability here, because most work is just going to be imperatively modifying your virtual machine’s state.
I think the only thing that ocaml has that I miss in sml is applicative functors, but in the end that just translates to slightly different module styles.
IMO: it's certainly "simpler" and "cleaner" (although it's been a while but IIRC the treatment of things like equality and arithmetic is hacky in its own way), which I think causes some people to prefer SML over aesthetics, but TBH I feel like many of OCaml's features missing in SML are quite useful. You mentioned applicative functors, but there's also things like labelled arguments, polymorphic variants, GADTs, even the much-maligned object system that have their place. Is there anything SML really brings to the table besides the omission of features like this?
mlton allows you to use a keyword to get the same facility for function overloading that is used for addition and equality. it's disabled by default for hygienic reasons, function overloading shouldn't be abused.
https://baturin.org/code/mlton-overload/
> labelled arguments
generally speaking if my functions are large enough for this to matter, i'd rather be passing around refs to structures so refactoring is easier.
> polymorphic variants
haven't really missed them.
> GADTs
afaik being able to store functors inside of modules would fix this (and I think sml/nj supports this), but SML's type system is more than capable of expressing virtual machines in a comfortable way with normal ADTs. if i wanted to get that cute with the type system, i'd probably go the whole country mile and reach for idris.
> even the much-maligned object system that have their place
never used it.
> Is there anything SML really brings to the table besides the omission of features like this?
mlton is whole-program optimizing (and very good at it)[1], has a much better FFI[2][3], is much less opinionated as a language, and the parallelism is about 30 years ahead[4]. the most important feature to me is that sml is more comfortable to use over ocaml. being nicer syntactically matters, and that increases in proportion with the amount of code you have to read and write. generally speaking, that splicitly in sml translates to a lot more mechanical sympathy.
all of these things combine for me, as an engineer, to what's fundamentally a more pragmatic language. the difference between sml and ocaml is not unlike the difference between edinburgh prolog and marseille prolog (but popularity and influence is reversed.) there is a particular quirkiness to french tastes in programming languages, not unlike their cars.
[1] - http://www.mlton.org/Performance
[2] - http://www.mlton.org/ForeignFunctionInterface
[3] - http://www.mlton.org/MLNLFFIGen
[4] - https://sss.cs.purdue.edu/projects/multiMLton/mML/Documentat...
...just kidding (maybe).
Assuming we're talking about a pure interpreter, pretty much anything that makes it straightforward to work with bytes and/or arrays is going to work fine. I probably wouldn't recommend Haskell, just because most operations are going to involve imperatively mutating the state of the machine, so pure FP won't win you much.
The basic process of interpretation is just: "read an opcode, then dispatch on it". You'll probably have some memory address space to maintain. And that's kind of it? Most languages can do that fine. So your preference should be based on just about everything else: how comfortable are you using it, how much do you like its abilities to interface with your host platform, how much do you like type checking, and so on.
People write "production-grade" emulators in C because it's fast, not because it's uniquely suited to the domain as a language.
As an aside I’ve always thought it would be awesome to create a single page app with an assembler editor and assembler/linker/loader to enable doing gameboy homebrew in the browser. I think it would be a great, accessible embedded development teaching opportunity.
Needs a (2022).
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/emulating-game-boy-in-j...
Essentially, there are 4 channels, each providing a number 0-15 on every tick. Emulator should mix them together (arithmetic average), scale up to 0-255 and feed to the sound buffer, adjusting the tick rate (4.19MHz) to the sound output rate (e.g.: 22 kHz) - taking every ~190 value (4.19MHz / 22 kHz) is a good start.
Now the 0..15 value that should be produced by each channel depends on its characteristics, but it's well documented:
https://gbdev.gg8.se/wiki/articles/Gameboy_sound_hardware
Channels 1 and 2 produce square waves, so a bunch of low (0) and high (15) values, with optional volume envelope (gradually going down from 15 to 0 on the "high" part of the square) and frequency sweep (alternating 0s and 15s slower or faster).
Channel 3 allows an arbitrary waveform, read from the memory.
Channel 4 is a random noise, generated by the LSFR.
See SoundModeX.java for the reference:
https://github.com/trekawek/coffee-gb/tree/master/src/main/j...
I wanna compare a CHIP 8 or NES emulator or port CAMLBOY to WASM using ocaml-wasm