You can switch the banks, switch banks, swi- swi- swi- swi- swi- — until you’re full of life

Hello everyone! I changed the name of my project directory, so I wasn’t seeing my hackatime or had the ability to write a devlog until I realised the problem, so let’s just dive right in!

Bank It

The next thing to deal with was bank switching and better behaviour for handling roms.

Cartridges are physical objects, and thus can have extra RAM and storage for the gameboy. These are controlled by MBCs (memory bank controllers). The most common ones are MBC1, MBC2, MBC3, and MBC5. For this project, for now, I am only emulating 1, 2, and 3. In the future, I will probably add more controllers once the full architecture is done for at least these three so I have an idea of hwo the skeletons should look.

The first step of bank switching was having the rom portion of the memory be read-only and writes to it do certain mbc actions, like enable ram or switch banks or switch ram. I am currently implementing the switching of banks. I need to get back to MBC1-specific flags and writes. See y’all next time!