|
|
Interview with Martin Korth the NO$GMB author
Hi
> 1) What inspired you to make NO$GMB?
Hehe, that was the performance of VGB. After making my CPC emulator I
tried some gameboy emulators to play my old gameboy games on my 386-33,
unfortunately none of the emulators was fast enough for my computer...
> 2) What was the hardest part in NO$GMB to code?
Mmmmh, the details. Putting an emulator together takes only a few days,
maybe a week. Lets you think 'cool, that has been easy' and then you end
up with thousands of details, fixing bugs, adding new features, and
especially accurate timing emulation.
All gameboys have the same CPU speed and that causes many games to crash
when something gets executed a mircosecond earlier or later than on a
real gameboy. A problem that doesn't exist in PC software which is
designed to work with hundreds of different CPUs, faster or slower video
cards, various display refresh rates, big or small memory caches and
different waitstates...
> 3) What is planned for future versions?
The next version will have a new VRAM Viewer for examining the contents
of the video RAM, and it'll fix some bugs caused by newer MBC memory
bank controllers.
Ah, and maybe I will teach myself windows programming sometimes, having
a windows version of the emulator might look nice, even though that'd
probably require at least a 486-computer, and I am highly afraid of the
damage done to nature by people whom buy new computers every two or
three years...
> 4) Any ideas about NO$NES/NO$SNES/NO$GEN?
Not really. I always promised to myself that I will never start to write
a new emulator again, and to spend my time on life instead. Well, broke
that rule two months ago and made the MSX emulator, that has been a raw
fun project though, I have been happy when it worked with two games, and
didn't spent too much work on further details...
> 5) What do you feel about other Gameboy emulators and their authors?
Idiots, all of them! Hehehe, no not really. Well, sometimes I suspected
that everybody who owns a C++ compiler wants to make his own gameboy
emulator, and I've been a bit worried that no$gmb might get lost amongst
the masses. Moment, my immense ego just tells me that most of the newer
emulators are probably somehow based on examining games with the no$gmb
debugger :-)
> 6) Give the NO$GMB users some info about yourself
Uh, I am sitting in front of my computer all day long, a boring guy,
somebody who didn't even made his way to the disco or flea-market nearby
lately, somebody who leaves his flat only to buy cigarettes, coffee and
milk. Well, a computer junkie. Hope nobody else gets trapped like me!
Okay, the sunny sides. Mmmmh, I am living in Hamburg, quite a big city,
with a sunny beach only five minutes away from my flat. My birthday is
3rd June 1972, means that I am getting impressive 27 years old very soon
:-) I am wearing mostly dark clothes, kept from my dark wave gothic
times. I would love techno or goa music, unfortunately nowadays they
charge around $20 for each party so I couldn't afford that, or if I
could - it still wouldn't be fun.
I am reaching all points of the city by bike or by subway, never owned a
car. Everybody who hears me: Get rid of your car! Especially if you are
living in a bigger city, and stop polluting the poor planet in general.
When something gets broken, repair it. Well, don't mess around with
broken high voltage stuff though.
> 7) How many time you spent on NO$GMB?
All my time. Around two years now, plus the time spent on no$cpc from
which I ported a lot of source code to make no$gmb.
> 8) Anything you like to add?
Yup, 763+123! Moment, that's... six, eight, eight... 886! Moment again,
checking it with the pocket calculator, not that everybody laughs at me
if it'd be wrong... Hehoo! All correct! :-)
> 9) What was your Friends/Family/IDSA/Nintendo comments about NO&GMB?
Well, my sister hates how much time I spend on programming, and she's
probably right, but she liked the 'large' gameboy screen. Somebody
showed the debugger to some Nintendo people a while ago, from what I
have heard, they have been impressed by the little CPU power which is
required for it, but they said they couldn't officially distribute it as
development tool, guess they don't like emulators because many people
might use it play pirated games...
> 10) What do you think of this interview?
Hehe, tricky question. Well, everything fine, love to reply questions,
only thing that I missed was asking me if I would like to multiply
something. You know, 8x8=40hex something like that...
Hope I have given more or less interesting replies, no warranty if
anybody gets bored or ill.
Cu, Martin
|
|