I've just uploaded a new Windows executable for Blupi's Adventures!

This new version uses an updated build of GearboyStandalone, a fork of GearBoy, the open-source Game Boy / Game Boy Color emulator. I've adapted it to create standalone Windows executables with the ROM built directly into them.

GearboyStandalone on GitHub

The project was originally inspired by GBCbag2, but I've been working on making the final executable much smaller. (around 20x smaller)

A new bundler

One of the main additions is a new Bundler.

Before this, putting a ROM inside the Windows executable meant opening the project in Visual Studio and recompiling everything.

Now there's a separate GearboyBundler.exe that takes care of it.

You just give it a ROM and it generates the standalone Windows executable. No Visual Studio, no need to open the source project, and no compilation setup.

This also means that if you're using GearboyStandalone for your own Game Boy project, you can easily make a standalone Windows executable from your ROM.

Much smaller executable

For Blupi's Adventures, the current sizes are:

• ROM: 1.00 MB
• Windows executable: 1.45 MB

The previous Windows executable was 3.59 MB.

So that's a pretty significant reduction. The final .exe is only around 450 KB larger than the ROM itself, while containing the emulator and everything needed to run the game.

And yes, AI helped a lot 🤖

I'll also be transparent about this: a lot of the work on the bundler and the size optimizations was done with heavy help from AI.