I built a Game Boy emulator in F#
Nick Kossolapov built a Game Boy emulator called Fame Boy using the F# programming language, motivated by a desire to understand how computers work and a personal connection to the Game Boy through childhood experiences with Pokémon. The emulator supports both desktop and web platforms, featuring sound and a functional interface that mimics the original hardware's behavior. Developed after completing foundational computer education through 'From NAND to Tetris' and building a CHIP-8 emulator, the project emphasizes functional programming principles while incorporating necessary mutability for performance.
- ▪Nick Kossolapov created a Game Boy emulator named Fame Boy using the F# programming language.
- ▪The emulator runs on both desktop and web platforms and includes sound support, using a simple interface between core logic and frontends.
- ▪Fame Boy was built following the 'From NAND to Tetris' course and a prior CHIP-8 emulator project called Fip-8.
- ▪The emulator's architecture models real Game Boy hardware components like the CPU, memory map, and PPU, with a central stepper function synchronizing execution.
- ▪Due to performance constraints, the emulator uses mutable state despite F#'s functional programming strengths.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I built a Game Boy emulator in F# Nick Kossolapov · April 2026 I’ve been working as a software engineer for over 8 years at this point, and admittedly I’ve never understood how computers actually work. So I figured I’d try to learn how they work by emulating one. Sorry Ben Eater, I’m not going to build one just yet. I spent hundreds of hours as a kid catching Pokémon, so the Game Boy was the perfect candidate: real hardware, relatively simple in scope, and something with a strong personal connection. Instead of jumping straight into it, I first did From NAND to Tetris. It was a great course, and it made me really understand the fundamentals of computers, like registers, memory, and the ALU. Then to get used to building an emulator, I built a CHIP-8 emulator in F#: Fip-8.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Github.
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