Nitrous is a high-performance Gameboy Color emulator aimed at squeezing every last drop of performance out of the Java runtime.
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It supports many popular games to a playable extent, including:
- Pokemon Silver/Gold/Crystal
- The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages
- Super Mario Bros. Deluxe
You may download Nitrous from the release tab, or build it yourself from the source.
The code is extensively documented, with excerpts and references to the Pandocs where appropriate, so it can be used as educational material for those interested in learning about Gameboy emulation.
Below is a (partial) list of Gameboy features Nitrous implements:
- Gameboy / Gameboy Color ROM support
- Support for MBC1, MBC3, and MBC5 memory bank controllers (savefile support)
- Fully accurate instruction emulation; perfect score on the cpu_instrs.gb test
- Noise / PCM / square wave programmable sound generators
- Checksum-based recoloring of original Gameboy games when running as Gameboy Color
For extra rendering speed, Nitrous bypasses the Java2D API to obtain rendering contexts for the various pipelines Java2D supports simultaneously (e.g., on Windows you can switch whether Nitrous should render using GDI, Direct3D or OpenGL at runtime). Though this allows for higher performance by reducing the abstraction of rendering, it comes at the cost of portability.
Currently, Nitrous has been tested on Windows 8 and 10 using Java 8 and 9, and briefly on Ubuntu 16.04 running Oracle's Java 8 binaries. Your mileage may vary with other setups, though Nitrous does make a reasonable attempt to fall back to well-supported APIs.