T3Boy: Making Accurate Game Boy Emulation Accessible with Next.js and WASM

Travis TI Kevin83 McGeehan is a senior software engineer at Gordon Food Service, ambassador for Task Videos, and administrator at Taskbot. He specializes in React Native and GitLab CI/CD and has showcased React patterns at JS World and React Summit.

TASing, or tool-assisted speedruns, involves playing video games frame by frame in an emulator to ensure perfect decision-making and execution. This is done by pausing, rewinding, and re-recording inputs to correct mistakes, creating precise runs that are archived separately from human speedruns.

TAS verification involves injecting inputs into a console programmatically to prove that an emulator accurately simulates the behavior of a console. It acts as a test suite for emulators and ensures the accuracy of tool-assisted speedruns.

T3 Boy is a new emulation front end built using React and Next.js with WebAssembly. It aims to provide accurate browser-based emulation for speedrunning and TASing, offering features like cloud save backups and high-quality video playback.

T3 Boy improves emulation accuracy by allowing users to upload the official BIOS for better precision and using WebAssembly to run high-performance emulation cores in a web environment, ensuring the emulator is accurate enough for TAS verification.

WebAssembly is a sandbox execution environment for running high-performance code in a browser. T3 Boy uses WebAssembly to compile C or C++ emulation cores, enabling them to run efficiently within a web-based interface.

The Pointer Events API in T3 Boy allows for multi-touch control and precise button manipulation, emulating real Game Boy controls for speedrunning. It enables simultaneous pressing of buttons like 'A' and 'up', enhancing gameplay accuracy.

T3 Boy uses Discord OAuth and a railway database to enable cloud save backups for authenticated users, allowing them to store and access their Game Boy saves online.

Challenges include ensuring emulation accuracy, handling audio re-sampling, integrating WebAssembly efficiently, and providing user-friendly interfaces for cloud saving and multi-touch controls.

Speedrunning is the practice of playing a video game with a timer running to track completion time, often with added arbitrary completion goals to create a variety of potential categories, such as beating a game with or without glitches.