Covell has stated that this fever dream of an idea came about in November 2022, while he was recovering at home after an operation and under heavy medication as part of his recovery. he has shared a rough work-in-progress version of the emulator available online as well so that others can start experimenting with it
A list of some of its main features taken from Covell’s site includes:
- All CPU instructions emulated (no guarantees about accuracy!)
- No promises about speed. It’s not fast.
- MBC1 cartridge mapper emulation, supporting cartridges <1 MByte in ROM / <192 KByte for CD-ROM version
- Basic sound emulation (frequency, volume sweep, wave channel, and pulse/noise channels)
- DMG BG & sprite palette emulation, with separately adjustable palettes
- Background layer, scrolling, per-scanline scrolling emulated
- Window layer simulated but with some limitations
- GB sprites, both 8×8 and 8×16, tile-flipping.
- An options screen with plenty of controls to change speed/accuracy, enable/disable features
Those interested in trying this out will need either the CD attachment for the PC Engine/TurboGrafx or a SuperGrafx, due to RAM requirements, and can find instructions on how to install the emulator on Covell’s website or in this YouTube video, both of which go over all of the Hu-Boy’stechnical details.
