hhugboy v1.0 released!

well hey, I made an emulator! an emulator by the name of hhugboy, which is very very heavily based on GEST. because the world definitely needed another gameboy emulator. I have zero experience of emulator coding and I've done a little bit of C++ before (which 99% of emulators are written in) but I don't get along with the language one bit, so it's been kind of... a learning experience for me, to say the least, but I've finally got something I'm fairly happy with.

the major thing with this emulator is it supports Sintax and Li Cheng mappers on unmodified copies of their roms (ie the "raw dump" versions I've posted previously). I've been hacking these games to make them work on standard emulators, but this has proved a little difficult with a few games, which got me thinking - why not try and emulate their mappers instead? and so.. I did. Those two, anyway. Li Cheng's was easy, Sintax's was a bit more work and isn't 100% perfect (new dumps may or may not run, but most should). Also, for any other emu authors or other interested parties, I'm going to document those two as much as I can at some point soon.

This does raise the problem of how to detect which games use which mappers - I've kind of tried to fudge it based on the boot logo but that isn't 100% reliable so I've put in a manual override in the menu too. It'd be nice if the Game Boy had a ROM file format like the NES's (iNES and UNIF) containing cartridge info independent of the internal GB ROM header (which was set by the developers and often wrong for unlicensed games) avoiding the need for either hacks, dubious autodetection attempts or manual overrides to determine which mapper to use. I don't know if there's enough interest for something like this to take off, given that it's only necessary for unlicensed games (and Mani's multicarts) though.

Anyway I've made a bunch of other improvements and tweaks to the original GEST, including screenshots, a recent ROM list, sharper filtering at larger sizes, Unicode filename support (which I haven't seen in any other emu, so have fun naming your roms in whatever language takes your fancy), a nicer/somehow appropriate onscreen font (from codeman38), and more!

Latest downloads, source code and issue tracker can all be found on bitbucket, so..go there! and try it. and if you find any bugs add them to the tracker.

(also I realise there aren't any Li Cheng roms out there to play on this thing but I'm planning to fix that in the near future too)