pureikyubu — Nintendo GameCube emulator

What is new

Release 2.0 is the peripheral release: the console's peripherals become one pool of devices — controllers, memory cards, the Broadband and Modem Adapters, the Game Boy Player and a Game Boy Advance on a link cable — with one window that configures them. Save states arrive for the GameCube side, the software GFX pipeline leaves its experimental status, and the interface gets eight themes, the Japanese titles of the selector and the two clocks of the emulation in its status bar.

Peripherals

One pool of devices

Every peripheral is a model of its own in src/peripherals.cpp: a controller, a card, an adapter or a Game Boy Player plugged into a socket of the SI, EXI or Hi-Speed bus, with its own settings and one property grid that draws them.

Network

Broadband and Modem Adapters

The two adapters of serial port 1 are emulated from the console's side, command word by command word, and the shipped backend puts the Broadband Adapter's frames on UDP so two emulators share one emulated segment.

Portable link

Game Boy Player and link cable

The Player is reached through the ARAM window it really lives in, and a Game Pak in its bay runs the same integrated Game Boy Advance. The link cable drives a Game Boy Advance on an SI socket the way a title does.

Save states

The whole console in a file

F5 and F7, ten slots, the File menu and the savestate/loadstate commands. The portable machines keep their own states, and a state loaded into a machine that has run on resumes the run.

Graphics

Soft GFX, out of beta

The software pipeline is no longer experimental: it draws the boot ROM's splash and the movie players, honours the CP's BP write mask, and the titles it runs agree with the shader backend.

Interface

Themes, dump and clocks

Eight themes drawn from the site's palette, Japanese titles in the selector, text that is one texel to one pixel, a video output window that follows its window — and gfxdump, which keeps the last frames of the graphics command stream.

Screenshots

Captured from the current development build (release 2.0 line).

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker drawn by the software GFX pipeline — **The Wind Waker**Its title screen drawn by the software GFX pipeline, in its own video output window.

The new DebugUI2 debugger with the Gekko registers and memory — **The new debugger**Every panel is the Markdown of a JDI command: the session history and the command line next to the Gekko registers, the disassembly and the physical memory.

Super Mario Sunshine reaching its intro cutscene — **Super Mario Sunshine**Boots, plays its intro FMV and reaches the scene after it, once the cache-management instructions stop faulting on a direct-store segment.

Metroid Fusion on the integrated Game Boy Advance — **Metroid Fusion**The integrated Game Boy Advance, booted by the emulator's own free boot ROM and drawn at 60 fps.

Soul Calibur II rendered by pureikyubu — **Soul Calibur II**A third-party 3D title rendered through the XF/TEV shader pipeline.

Build it

Windows

Open scripts/VS2026/pureikyubu.sln in Visual Studio 2026 and press Build. Debug and Release configurations exist for both the Win32 and the SDL front end.

Linux

CMake + SDL2 build, verified under WSL2 as well:

sudo apt install libglew-dev
git clone https://github.com/emu-russia/pureikyubu.git
cd pureikyubu && git submodule update --init
cd build && cmake .. && make
./pureikyubu pong.dol

The software GFX pipeline

The Flipper graphics subsystem now has a second rendering path: a software (CPU) implementation of the same hardware blocks, written from the GameCube specifications, switchable on the fly through the GFX_PIPELINE configuration variable and drawing through a real EFB memory array whose copy-engine output (the XFB) the video interface scans out.

Read the page · По-русски · Wiki · Issue #384

The MCP server

The emulator can run as a local MCP (Model Context Protocol) server: an LLM agent starts it as its own child process and drives the whole debug interface through it — every command of the emulator becomes a tool. Load a disc image, read the Gekko registers, dump main memory, watch the hardware counters, take a screenshot.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pureikyubu": { "command": "pureikyubu_headless", "args": ["--mcp"] }
  }
}

Read the page · По-русски · Wiki · Issue #383

Up next

The peripherals are not finished, and the next release is where they are finished: the top half of the network stack behind the Broadband Adapter, the Game Boy Player's own firmware and the frame stream it feeds, the multi-boot transfer the link cable still needs, and the Game Boy Advance of a Player or a link device travelling in a GameCube save state.

After that the project moves into its steady state: planned, methodical improvement — performance work and bug fixing release after release, rather than another feature push. The architecture is in place; what remains is making what is there faster, more exact and more complete. The details are in the 2.0 release notes.

Documentation

Release Notes 2.0

English release notes · Заметки о релизе на русском · Markdown

Digest since 1.6

English digest · Дайджест на русском

Wiki

Emulator internals: Flipper, GFX, Gekko, Debug UI and the DSP IROM analysis.

A work-in-progress Nintendo GameCube emulator