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chrismaltby / gb-studio

A quick and easy to use drag and drop retro game creator for your favourite handheld video game system
https://www.gbstudio.dev
MIT License
8.57k stars 472 forks source link

EXE export #886

Open darkhog opened 2 years ago

darkhog commented 2 years ago

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Distribution of your GB Studio games outside of GB flashcarts and web platforms such as itchio, Kongregate, etc., selling on Steam in particular is problematic. First of all, you have to hunt down an emulator that is legal to use in commercial applications, secondly, you need to figure out a way so that your game's rom would start upon launch of such emulator. Both tasks are time consuming and cumbersome. Not to mention that most of the time you want also disable most of the emulator's UI, save maybe for keyboard/gamepad mapping to not confuse users with emulation-specific settings.

Describe the solution you'd like I would like to be able to export games as windows/linux/macos executables, with the ROM embedded in a simplified emulator that is close to how the game behaves when launching in game test from GB Studio. This also would make easier to distribute the game to people that aren't necessarily emulator-savvy such as youtubers/streamers that may not want to play browser version for variety of reasons (issues with capturing entire game, not stable internet connection, etc.)

RichardULZ commented 2 years ago

This is problematic as most small ways of bundling an emulator with a game in a small app will be detected as a virus. The larger method (that gbstudio runs on) is packaging electron (chromium web browser) with the JavaScript emulator and rom used for preview and web view, this makes games easily 50-100mb, and often less near than a simple .exe. i don't think you can do that with a pre packed electron app either, so gbstudio might get way bigger...

Exporting stand alone apps for each rom from gbstudio might be out of scope for the small dev team.

darkhog commented 2 years ago

Most small ways = not all small ways. Plus, there are engines that do just that and they're not detected as viruses. The Games Factory comes to mind...

RichardULZ commented 2 years ago

Don't know of any gameboy emulators that are multi platform, easy to combine with a rom to make standalone, and not html5 based requiring a browser bundled.

Someone got close combining bgb and a rom with batch script, then turning the whole thing into an exe, but it was constantly flagged as a virus.

Bit short on developer experience to do that sadly.

darkhog commented 2 years ago

Didn't someone rewrite the testing emulator for 3.0? If so, maybe that same person could do this?

RichardULZ commented 2 years ago

The new testing emulator is the same as the new html5 export emulator, binjgb, it is web assembly based and must run in a browser.

darkhog commented 2 years ago

Then all you need to do is to port it to a native language or a language that can crosscompile to both native and web such as haxe or Dart.

maxoakland commented 2 years ago

Then all you need to do is to port it to a native language or a language that can crosscompile to both native and web such as haxe or Dart.

This is an open source project so your feature additions are welcome!