sprocketnes is an emulator for the Nintendo Entertainment System written in the Rust programming language.

Its purpose is to serve as a technology demonstration to show how the Rust programming language is suitable for systems software such as emulators. It has many shortcomings and is not intended to be a production-quality emulator. sprocketnes is also designed to be a relatively clean example codebase, showing off various Rust idioms.

The Rust garbage collector is not used in this project, and unsafe code is kept to a minimum.

The NES was chosen for this project because:

• It's familiar to most hackers.

• It's a reasonably simple system to emulate.

• Because of its popularity, its workings are relatively well-documented.

• It's CPU-bound, so it can serve as a benchmark to help optimize Rust code.

• The audio requires some measure of real-time operation, which tests Rust's real-time capabilities.

The main controls are as follows:

• A: Z

• B: X

• Start: Enter

• Select: Right shift

• D-Pad: Arrows

Other keys:

• Save state: S

• Load state: L

• Quit: Escape

If you want to build sprocketnes, you will first need rust-sdl, available at https://github.com/brson/rust-sdl. You will also need the Speex codec library installed; on the Mac you can install it with brew install speex. Finally, you will also need the Rust master branch; no Rust release can build sprocketnes.

To build (add -O if you actually want playable speed):

rustc nes.rs -L<SDL-LIB>

There are numerous demos and games available for free for use with this emulator at http://nesdev.com/.

Enjoy!