SameBoy 1.0.4 adds a Sharp Bilinear filter and libretro upgrades

Developer LIJI32 has released version 1.0.4 of SameBoy, bringing a new default scaling filter and a slate of libretro core improvements to the cycle-accurate Game Boy emulator. The update is available now on the project's official GitHub repository.

SameBoy is an open-source emulator focused on extreme accuracy for the original Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Super Game Boy. It routinely passes demanding hardware test suites like mooneye-gb and blargg's tests. It also includes its own clean-room boot ROMs and supports the Best Effort Save State (BESS) specification. That format lets you move save states between different compatible emulators so you don't lose your progress.

A new default look for Cocoa and SDL

The most obvious change for casual players is the new Pixelated/Sharp Bilinear scaling filter. This is now the default filter in both the Cocoa and SDL frontends. The existing CRT scaling filter also received an updated look, and you can now record audio directly to a VGM log file in these frontends.

Fixing hardware that never shipped

Emulation accuracy is SameBoy's primary draw, and version 1.0.4 includes a few highly specific corrections. The emulator now correctly reports the current weekday when emulating the Workboy. The Workboy was an unreleased personal digital assistant peripheral designed by Fabtek in 1992, and getting its calendar functions to work accurately in 2026 is a fun dedication to preservation. It's the kind of detail most players won't notice, but preservationists will.

The update also improves the accuracy of Super Game Boy command processing. Nintendo released the SNES adapter in 1994, and it contained actual Game Boy hardware inside the cartridge. Emulating the communication between the Game Boy CPU and the SNES is notoriously difficult, so any improvements here are welcome. Additionally, the update improves sanitization for Game Boy Printer save state data and fixes a bug that caused small ROM files to be misidentified as MMM01 cartridges.

Libretro and iOS upgrades

The libretro core, which powers SameBoy inside frontends like RetroArch, received several backend upgrades. It now supports Virtual File System (VFS) operations and custom logging. The core will also render audio directly in the frontend's native sample rate if the host software supports it, and it no longer incorrectly reports an RTC memory region when emulating cartridges that lack a real-time clock.

On the Apple side, the iOS frontend adds support for iOS 27 and the iPhone Duo. The update also includes a long list of bug fixes across all platforms. A crash caused by periodic battery saves running on the wrong thread in the Cocoa frontend is fixed. Controller hotkeys now work properly on newer macOS versions, and Windows file dialogs will automatically exit full screen mode so they don't trigger windowing system bugs. That is a welcome fix.

The new version maintains backwards compatibility with save states from SameBoy 0.14.3 and newer.