#Pebble time palette code

We wanted to connect an NES controller to the emulator via the Pebble Time’s smartstrap port, and, at the time, the smartstrap APIs had not yet been released in the public Pebble SDKīefore we added smartstrap support for the NES controller, we used the following button control scheme for testing the emulator:.Pebble SDK apps only get 256 KB of resource storage, so building the emulator into the firmware gave us unrestricted access to the watch’s flash storage for storing ROMs (necessary for large ROMs such as Pokemon Red which has a size of 1 MB).

#Pebble time palette code

Game Boy emulation requires more RAM than is available to Pebble SDK apps (only 64 KB for RAM and code combined), so by building the emulator into the firmware we could resize the firmware’s RAM partitions to support the emulator’s memory requirements.

We ported BitBoy into a modified version of the Pebble firmware instead of as a regular Pebble SDK app for a few important reasons: We picked BitBoy because it was written in C and had already been demonstrated to run on the ARM Cortex M4 STM32F405 CPU (168 MHz 192 KB RAM), which is in the same family of processors as the Pebble Time’s ARM Cortex M4 STM32F439ZG CPU (run at 100 MHz, 256 KB RAM). Version One: Custom FirmwareĪround May 2015 I worked with Varun Reddy to port a Game Boy emulator called BitBoy (which is itself an ARM port of the gnuboy Game Boy emulator) to the Pebble Time. no Game Boy Color ROMs), although they both did support games with custom color palettes.

We worked on two versions of this project one version ported a Game Boy emulator into a custom version of the Pebble Time firmware, and another version ported a different Game Boy emulator into a regular Pebble Time app built with the public Pebble SDK.īoth versions only ran original Game Boy ROMs (i.e. One of my favorite internal hackathon projects I worked on with some Pebble coworkers involved porting Game Boy emulators to the Pebble Time. I worked on UI and graphics firmware at Pebble from April 2015 until the company was acquired by Fitbit in December 2016.