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| Author | Gray Brick - New GameBoy emulator for System 7 / 68k Macintosh (Read 100 times) | ||||||||||||||||||
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Bolkonskij
Administrator 2048 MB  Posts: 2081 
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on: August 22, 2026, 12:38
I've been spending the past two+ weeks in wonderful Greece, without access to any computer (aside my smartphone) so it is only now that I got to give this a try and sharing the news, but I'm impressed! Gray Bricks is a new emulator for running Game Boy games on your 68k Macintosh. Think Tetris, Super Mario Land and Zelda. I've been testing it on my IIci (which has a DayStar PowerCache 40 Mhz upgrade) with a couple of Game Boy titles I had at hand. It ran all of them, including audio, which is impressive in itself. Performance varies, the Super Mario Land 1 & 2 titles worked very well, with fps in the 40-60 range. So did Tetris. Other classics like Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles or Solar Striker ran noticeably slower, which leads me to believe that the emulator was perhaps hand tweaked for those Nintendo classics? Of course, emulation should fly if you use a 68k emulator on more modern hardware. (looking @68040  Anyway, pretty impressive. I've tested version 2.2.0, no idea how well it does on PPC and later Mac OS versions but I suppose it would run fine. Here's the official website with more info: (note, it's retro compatible!) http://constcast.org/gb6.html This thing will even run on System 6! |
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Last Edit: August 22, 2026, 12:54 by Bolkonskij
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68kmac
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64 MB  Posts: 65 System 7 Newcomer!
Reply #1 on: August 22, 2026, 17:10
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I do have two classic GBs with IPS panels, but I still had to try the 475. MYSTIC QUEST on the MAC!!! Runs great! Mega Man 3 struggles a bit (2x scaling, sound on) – you might see 52 FPS with lots of movement/scrolling. But who cares. Perfect for 'chill' games! Btw - using Frameskip 1/2 (with no skip, Mega Man 3 runs with about 42-48 FPS).
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lauland
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512 MB Posts: 692 Symtes 7 Mewconer!
Reply #2 on: August 22, 2026, 17:12
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Hold the phone! That thing has a JIT to m68k? That's pretty rare, it's almost always the other way around. It must be halfway decent to get the performance it does. It will be for z80 instructions, but I am definitely going to peruse the source code. Might be some VERY interesting ideas for emulating other cpus on m68k.
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 2048 MB Posts: 2081
Reply #3 on: August 25, 2026, 14:01
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Yeah, I have been playing around with it some more and my first impression holds up. It's a very nice piece of software for faster System 7 Macs! For fun I've also tried it out on my Mac OS 9 machine (a Mac Mini G4). It runs it, of course, way too fast, so you need to choose "limit to 60 fps" in the menu in order to get it to slow down. Other than that and the palette needing some tweaking (colours looked like inverted with standard settings) it does work fine on OS 9 too! (alright but then GBMac had been doing that before on OS 9...)
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lauland
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512 MB Posts: 692 Symtes 7 Mewconer!
Reply #4 on: August 25, 2026, 14:59
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FYI because it uses JIT, it translates the z80 code to m68k on the fly, so it can be more crashy than a strict interpreted emulator, but this gives great speed. This is because it is running "native code", so there are less guard rails, and they may accidentally do "dangerous" things, such as write to the "wrong" parts of memory or get interrupts tangled. The JIT concepts could definitely be used to target cpus than z80, so other very fast 8 bit emulators could be done (like 6502)...relatively...easily. Or, taking it as is and targeting other z80 machines would be even "easier". Arcade machines, msx, spectrum immediately pop to mind.
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