I wanted to write an Apple /]/[ emulator as a side project to provide me a project that I could work on outside of work hours. Oftentimes I have found that while I love game programming, there are a lot of things that I want to do, but don’t have time to do. Working on the emulator provides me a way to do something fun and fairly educational at the same time. I have plans to work on other emulators in the future, mainly because they are (in my opinion) pretty neat projects.
I had the follwoing goals for this project:
- Use C++11. Love it or hate it, I use C++ every day and wanted to stay in this language. I don’t see game programming moving away from this language anytime soon.
- Cross platform. Several of the emulators that I have seen have been mac only, or windows only. I wanted to provide something that would be useable on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
- Create easy to understand code. Programmers have a tendency to get fancy when there is no need to do so. In reviewing other emulator projects, many look fairly obfuscted in critical sections with not a lot of internal documentation on how things actually work. Code is self documenting, but that is not a good teaching tool.
In order to provide cross platform rendering, I settled on SDL as the main mechanism with which to provide this functionality. For reasons that I will expand on in another post, this decision ultimatly means SDL + openGL but it has worked out well, as I have gotten the benefit of event handling (and soon audio) that SDL provides.
My intent here is to provide updates on the project and expand on how/why I made certain programming decsisions. By no means is my code the most elegant. My goal (as stated above) is to be readable. Gone are the days of having to make an Apple /]/[ emulator as fast as possible through arcane code optimizations. Modern hardware and compilers will ensure that this current emulator won’t need a ton of those tricks.