Wzonka-Lad is a Nintendo

Game Boy The is a handheld game console developed by Nintendo, launched in the Japanese home market on April 21, 1989, followed by North America later that year and other territories from 1990 onwards. Following the success of the Game & Watch single-ga ...

emulator for the

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore International, Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-b ...

series of

home computer Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a s ...

History

Wzonka-Lad was written by Ville Helin in 68020 assembler. Development began in 1996 and continued through 1999. The project was started because existing Game Boy emulators for Amiga, such as Virtual Game Boy (VGB), which was written in C, ran too slowly on Amiga hardware. Helin wrote Wzonka-Lad in assembly language to improve performance. Wzonka-Lad was originally released as shareware, with registration required to unlock audio support. In August 2003, it was re-licensed as free software under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

, and the source code was made publicly available.

Features

Wzonka-Lad is written entirely in assembly language, offering a graphical user interface and a range of features despite its low-level implementation. The emulator requires at least a Motorola 68020 processor and provides several options to vary game speed and colors. It supports graphics and sound cards via CyberGraphX and AHI, and can run on the Amiga Workbench.

Performance and Compatibility

Compared to other Amiga Game Boy emulators, early versions of Wzonka-Lad (such as 0.64) were slower but more compatible than AmigaGameBoy, and faster than Unix ports like VGB. Later versions, such as 0.99, achieved playable speeds for most games on systems with a 68030 50 MHz processor or higher. Wzonka-Lad was recognized as the leading Amiga Game Boy emulator by the early 2000s, though VGB still had a slight edge in compatibility. The emulator offers several executables, including "Full," "Fast," and "Warp" versions. The "Fast" version uses simplified Z80 emulation for better speed, while "Warp" reduces interrupt processing for maximum performance. The "Full" version is the slowest but most compatible.

References

External links

Wzonka-Lad homepage
1996 software Amiga emulation software Game Boy emulators Shareware Assembly language software Free video game console emulators {{videogame-software-stub