A downloadable ROM

A deceptively difficult (you might even say delightfully devilish) project. The Game Boy does not support arbitrary audio - it can only generate simple waveforms. We abuse the custom waveform generator ("channel 3") along with the volume control to get 7-bit (ish) audio at 18kHz, producing acceptable quality sound. Credit to MrWint, who I shamelessly stole this concept from, as detailed here: http://tasvideos.org/5384S.html

In addition to the audio, a whole video was planned. Support exists in the final rom for playing complex video, including changing the entire background map every frame, and changing half the palette selection on a per-line basis.

As it is, we ran out of time to actually create assets for this fancy graphics engine, and so the final product is a single still frame. None-the-less it is visually impressive as it accomplishes having more than 8 palettes on screen at once by changing palettes mid-frame.

You can see the gory details here: https://github.com/ekimekim/gb_music_video
Warning: Lots of cruft, extremely unreadable code, vestigial files and general hackery.


There's a known issue where the audio will noticeably lose quality towards the end. This is almost certainly some obscure timing issue I was unable to track down. Alas, I am out of time.

Download

Download
steamedhams.gb 8 MB

Install instructions

Download and load into your Gameboy emulator of choice.

Note this ROM may stretch some emulators to breaking point - the sound may come out fuzzy or the colors may come out strange.

Tested as working well on Gambatte, as well as on a real Gameboy Color using a flash cart.

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