Ostrich
Ostrich is a macOS media player app for playback of Game Boy Sound System files. Under the covers, it is a Nintendo Game Boy emulator written in Swift.
This readme captures how to build and use Ostrich. For more technical details, check out my blog post on it here.
Status
Ostrich emulates both of the Game Boy's pulse wave channels, and can play back the music from about half of the Game Boy's commercial titles. The other half require emulation of cartridge memory banking, or some of the less common LR35902 instructions, which are currently unsupported. The 4-bit wave and noise channels are also currently unsupported.
Popular working titles include Tetris, Castlevania, Double Dragon, and Batman.
Building
Ostrich is built using Xcode. It uses AudioKit, an open-source audio framework. Ostrich is most recently tested using Xcode 8.3.3 (Swift 3.1), AudioKit 3.7, and macOS 10.12.5. Ostrich requires macOS 10.11 (El Capitan) or newer.
To build Ostrich:
- Clone this repository
- Download an AudioKit macOS release; note the most recently tested version above
- Open the Ostrich workspace, ostrich.xcworkspace, with Xcode
- Install the AudioKit framework to both the gameboy and gbsplayer Xcode projects as described in the AudioKit installation guide
- Build the gameboy project
- Build the gbsplayer project
Run Ostrich by running the gbsplayer project.
Usage
Run Ostrich and load a GBS file (typically with extension .gbs) using File -> Open.
Playback controls are at the bottom portion of the interface. From left to right:
- The directional pad controls track selection and volume control:
- Left: previous track
- Right: next track
- Up: volume up
- Down: volume down
- The select and start buttons toggle muting of pulse channels 1 and 2, respectively
- The B and A buttons are stop and play/pause, respectively
The rest of the interface is dedicated to playback state. From top to bottom:
- The topmost text rows are the game name, composers, and copyright owner
- The upper and lower waveforms represent pulse channels 1 and 2, respectively
- The light near the bottom left represents playback state: red is stopped, yellow is paused, green is playing
Note that Ostrich may be resized for your viewing pleasure.
Technical Details
For technical details on Ostrich, check out my blog post on it here.
Author
Ostrich is written entirely by myself, Ryan Conway. It would not have been possible without the help of Austin Zheng and the documentation of Game Boy hardware written by many and available online. Some of this documentation is captured in resources.txt.
I set out to create Ostrich with the goals of teaching myself Swift and furthering my knowledge of hardware emulation, system design, and retro game music. To those ends I believe Ostrich has been a success.
License
Ostrich is copyright 2016-2017 Ryan Conway. Its source code is released under the MIT license; see LICENSE.txt.
Ostrich uses works that others have produced and made available under the terms of different licenses:
- Game Boy input images adapted from photograph by William Warby (https://www.flickr.com/photos/wwarby/), licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Generic license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/).
- The FontStruction “GameBoy Super Mario Land” (http://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/727186) by “nsun” is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/).