This is a work-in-progress emulator for the Nintendo Entertainment System, written in Rust. This project primarily exists as a learning experience for me and I do not know if/when it will be complete.
The emulator currently runs Donkey Kong without audio.
- implement sprite zero hit (and sprite overflow? is that used by any game?)
- fix individual scanline rendering (currently accurate in rendering whole frames at once, not in parallel with CPU)
- implement PPU mask emphasis/grayscale
- implement the APU (audio)
- implement scrolling
- implement second controller
- implement horizontal mirroring
- implement more cartridge mappers besides mapper 0 (known as NROM, used by Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros)
This should build and run on any system that has Rust, Cargo, and SDL2 installed (Windows, MacOS, or Linux). However, I have only built and tested this on a 64 bit Pop!_OS 18.04 Linux Machine. For me, installing dependencies would look like:sudo apt install git rustc cargo libsdl2-2.0-0 libsdl2-dev.
Once dependencies are installed, building the project is as simple as cloning, changing to the project directory, and using Cargo. On Linux, this looks like:git clone https://github.com/falkenum/nes.git && cd nes && cargo build --release. The executable will be target/release/nes.
Before running, you need a ROM to run. This type of file has the .nes extension. You can find ROMs online pretty easily. From the root project directory, once the project is built, run the emulator with target/release/nes /path/to/rom.nes.
Controls are currently hard-coded as follows:
| NES button | Key |
|---|---|
| A | a |
| B | s |
| Select | z |
| Start | x |
| Up | Up arrow key |
| Down | Down arrow key |
| Left | Left arrow key |
| Right | Right arrow key |