NES Emulator

Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Emulator writen in Rust

This project is under development and it's still far to be a full emulator. Although, any contribution is welcome.

Features

Done

• CPU (MOS6502) emulated
• Memories (RAM, ROM and mirrored RAMs)
• Buses
• GTK4 GUI capable to render frames
• Partial Maper-0 support
• PPU (Picture Processing Unit) background rendering

Work in progress

• PPU (Picture Processing Unit) sprite rendering
• Mapper-0 suppot
• Support more mappers

TODOs and ideas

• APU (Audio Processing Unit)
• Web interface (compiling to web assembly)

Run nes-emulator

Dependencies

GTK-4 Graphical interface

When using GTK-4 desktop application to render NES screen, GTK-4 library is needed. To install the necessary dependencies, refer to GTK-4 Rust bindings documentation. For Linux users based on Debian and derivates, install the following libraries:

• libgtk-4-dev
• build-essential

Run nes-emulator binary

nes-emulator can be run with:

cargo run --release

For the moment, it'll run a binary with a hardcoded path to a cartidge. Open src/main.rs and change the path to load you NES game.

NES games must be in iNES file format.

Run examples

There's some useful examples to look at in the examples/ folder. They can be run with:

cargo run --example <EXAMPLE>

Some of the examples point to a ROM which is not part of the repository. If that's the case, download a ROM and change the cartidge path in the example.

Test nes-emulator

To run nes-emulator tests, execute:

cargo test

Debugging

nes-emulator library uses logging as observability/debugging tool. Some modules can export verbose logs, so it's recommended to customize RUST_LOG to print only the logs needed.

For example, to log CPU instructions being executed, run with RUST_LOG="nes_emulator::processor::cpu=DEBUG"

Screenshots

Let's see some nice screenshots of things working right now :)

Donkey Kong:

Donkey Kong 3:

Ice Climber:

Contributing

Contributions are more than welcome. However, to make code more standard, pre-commit is used. Please, install it and run it before submitting any code to this repo. Thanks!

To install the pre-commit hooks, execute:

pre-commit install