Building a Game Boy emulator in F# to understand computer architecture
By
elvis70
1mo ago· 26 min readen
100/100
Golden Brown
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Kettled twice. Extra chewy, extra trustworthy.
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Summary
A software engineer with 8 years of experience shares their journey of building a fully functional Game Boy emulator in F# to understand how computers work at a low level. The project was motivated by a personal connection to the Game Boy (catching Pokémon as a kid) and was preceded by completing the "From NAND to Tetris" course. The result is a working emulator with sound, running on both desktop and web platforms.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledI've been working as a software engineer for over 8 years at this point, and admittedly I've never understood how computers actually work.
So I figured I'd try to learn how they work by emulating one.
I spent hundreds of hours as a kid catching Pokémon, so the Game Boy was the perfect candidate: real hardware, relatively simple in scope, and something with a strong personal connection.
Hundreds of hours, many late nights, and a working Game Boy emulator in F# with sound, running on desktop and web.
