The Ultimate Game Boy Talk (33c3)

media.ccc.de · 241.6K views · 2016-12-30 · 1:01:07

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Overview

Michael Steil's 33c3 talk explains essentially everything about the Game Boy: CPU, video hardware, peripherals, and the tricks used by games and demos. It revives the era of counting clock cycles around hardware limits.

On Hacker News

HN treats it as the standard starting point for Game Boy emulator writers and homebrew developers, with several calling it one of their favorite talks.

Recommended by 10 HN people across 10 months · HN mentions 2017–2026

Topics

Game history & retro gaming Computer architecture & CPUs Demoscene & retrocomputing

What people said

rtpg · 2026-06 · Strong recommendation
the Gameboy, not the SNES, but this talk is very very good at going in detail about a bunch of internals. The graphics stuff is 29 minutes in but I love the whole video. Very much a high level guide to building a "retro-y" fantasy console for people into that stuff [VIDEO]
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msarnoff · 2025-04 · Strong recommendation
Michael’s blog is one of my favorites. His “Ultimate Guide” talks are great and I rewatch them at least once a year. Ultimate Guide to the C64: [LINK] Ultimate Guide to the Game Boy: [VIDEO] Ultimate Guide to the Apollo Guidance Computer: [LINK]
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jchw · 2019-04 · Strong recommendation
I really like the Gameboy hardware; it's limited, but the design feels very elegant in it's simplicity. I've written a couple of toy Gameboy emulators at this point. It's a bit challenging to get anything working, and honestly I have no idea how to approach audio at all. Nevertheless, it's still quite fun. The LCD timings are a point of curiosity for me. It seems there's still a slight bit of mystery around it, still today. I was inspired to play with emulating Gameboy specifically after an excellent 33c3 talk, The Ultimate Game Boy Talk, which I highly recommend. [VIDEO] (Some day I would like to approach emulation for more platforms, both newer and older, but I feel I still have so much time learn about designing emulators that I haven't bothered with that yet. It's so open ended, and handling things like cycle counting has a lot of different approaches of varying desirability.)
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Sources

Video by media.ccc.de, played through YouTube.

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