Crowdsourced Gameboy Advanced

Inspired by Twitch Plays Pokemon.

This brings the idea of crowdsourced gaming off of twitch and onto a more global platform, the web browser.

Building Python Emulator

Docker

Make sure you have docker installed, then run the following in the root directory of the repository:

docker build . -t crowdsourced-gba
docker run -p 3000:8888 -e LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/emulator -v `pwd`:/home crowdsourced-gba

The first line builds the Docker image, called crowdsourced-gba, with all the dependencies listed in the Dockerfile and then performs the building process for the emulator. The second line loads the Docker image and starts up the python server with the port 8888 exposed in the container. The exposed port is then connected on the local machine on port 3000.

OSX

First, install all the dependencies in requirements.txt

pip install -r requirements.txt

mgba, the emulator, has its own dependencies.

brew install cmake ffmpeg imagemagick libzip qt5 sdl2 libedit

The following commands are to produce the mgba python library.

cd emulator
./osx_make.sh
make mgba-py

There should now be a python directory, this contains the source code to install as a python module.

pip install -e ./python

To test, running the following command should not produce any errors.

python -c "import mgba"

Note: If you're getting an ImportError due to importing mgba, try setting the following environment variable to the directory where the dylib files are stored (denoted as MGBA_DYLIB_PATH).

export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=MGBA_DYLIB_PATH

Finally, to run the python server:

python src/main.py roms/legend_of_zelda_the_minish_cap.gba

The only argument is the GBA binary file, which in the example is The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap.

Unit Tests

To run the python tests:

python -m unittest discover -s src/tests -p '*.py'

Dependencies

• mgba, GBA emulator with exposed python APIs (Distributed under the Mozilla Public License version 2.0)
• Tornado, python web server that supports websockets natively
• Pillow, python imaging library