CARBON TESTING
Josh Fairhurst and Dimitris Giannakis on creating a new retro engine for Switch
Limited Run Games’ Josh Fairhurst on getting classic handheld releases running on Switch
Darran Jones chats to Josh Fairhurst and Dimitris Giannakis about their impressive new Game Boy-based emulator
Limited Run Games started off by selling physical PS Vita releases of its own games, before expanding to other developers as well as other systems like the PS4, Switch and even the odd Sega CD release. After testing the waters with several revered Lucasarts IPS, including Monkey Island and Star Wars, the publisher has now started to release numerous Game Boy titles and has even created a brandnew engine that lets you play emulated Game Boy games on the Switch. The first Switch release is Wayforward’s Shantae, but cofounder of Limited
Run Games, Josh Fairhurst hopes that more releases are on the way.
One of the key factors of the new engine is the collaboration between Limited Run’s engineer, Joe Modzeleski and Dimitris Giannakis who is better known as Youtube’s Modern Vintage Gamer. “Joe had seen a lot of Dimitris’ videos on Youtube and had found one where Dimitris had ported the original Diablo to Switch for fun in his spare time,” says Josh. “This impressed us and it was clear that Dimitris would be the perfect person to help us with our Carbon Engine.”
Dimitris agreed to the project and began working with Joe and the pair began making good progress. “Development took over twelve months, with two people involved,” confirms Dimitris. “I handled the coding, with Joe providing direction on the engine and what features we’d need. He would often playtest and we’d compare the engine to real hardware to determine how large the deltas were with respect to things such as input latency, audio quality and overall user experience.”
Josh feels this playtesting was crucial in order to emulate the classic systems and puts a lot of it down to Joe’s diligence during testing. “Joe is very sensitive to input lag,” Josh continues, “so he would test a variety of games in the engine to ensure that everything was as solid as it possibly could be. Joe also worked on a lot of the front-end features.”
But why call it the Carbon Engine? To us it sounds like something that’s dated, but Dimitris looks at it in a different way. “I chose the name Carbon because in engineering, carbon fibre polymers are lightweight but also can be stronger than steel,” he tells us.
“This is what I wanted the emulation to be – simple but could handle itself as a commercial product. The name caught on and pretty soon Josh and the leadership team at LRG began calling it the Carbon Engine.”
Another strength of the engine that Dimitris and Joe have created is its flexibility which allows Limited Run to emulate the Game Boy Colour and Game Boy Advance as well as Nintendo’s original 1989 console.