Ardens

Ardens is an Arduboy simulator that is useful for profiling and debugging.

Try out the full debugger here. Drag and drop an Arduboy game (.hex/.elf/.arduboy) and any FX data (.bin) onto the page.

Try the minimal player with one of the game URLs below:

• ArduChess
• ArduGolf
• ArduRogue

Features

• Profiler
  • Identify performance hotspots at the instruction level
  • View inclusive CPU load or raw cycle counts per instruction, hotspot, or symbol
• Live CPU Usage Graph
• Disassembly View
  • Source lines, symbols, and labels intermixed with instructions
  • Addresses of jumps, branches, and calls expanded to label/offset
  • Click on jump addresses to scroll to their destination
  • Hover over RAM addresses to see their symbol, data type, and value
  • Jump to any symbol from sorted list
• Source View
• Call Stack
• RAM/Registers View
  • Edit any register or RAM value live
  • Show RAM consumption from global variables
  • Track current and maximum stack usage
  • Set read/write breakpoints on RAM address
  • View a portion of RAM as a display buffer
• Simulation Control
  • Slow down or speed up simulation speed
  • Pause, continue, step into, step over, step out
• Serial Monitor
• LEDs
• EEPROM (editable)
• External flash (editable)
• Display (SSD1306) Internals
• Display View
  • Customize palette and filters
  • Optionally model row driver current limiting
  • Temporal filtering for grayscale games
• Sound Waveform (Time and Frequency)
• Global and Local Variables
  • Show all accessible locals and their data types and values
  • User-defined list of globals to watch
• Screenshots
  • Record PNG or GIF
  • Optionally record sound as WAV
  • Customize palettes and filters for recording
• Snapshots
  • Save/restore snapshot of entire device state

Keyboard Bindings

Key	Purpose
Arrows	Arduboy: directional buttons
A/Z	Arduboy: A button
S/X/B	Arduboy: B button
F1	(Desktop Debugger Only) Save screenshot of entire window
F2	Save screenshot
F3	Toggle GIF recording
F4	(Debugger only) Save snapshot
F5	(Debugger only) Pause/Continue
F8	Reset
F11	Toggle fullscreen
O	(Debugger only) Settings window
P	(Debugger only) Toggle player mode
R	Rotate display

Command Line Usage

To invoke from the command line with specific options and game file(s), use the syntax /path/to/Ardens param=value file=game.hex, where the parameters are the same as in the URL parameters below.

For example:

Ardens palette=highcontrast grid=normal current=true file=game.hex file=fxdata.bin

Creating a link to a playable Arduboy game

There is a web build hosted on GitHub pages: to create a link to a playable Arduboy game using Ardens Player, you can follow these patterns:

https://tiberiusbrown.github.io/Ardens/player.html?file=https://example.com/game.arduboy https://tiberiusbrown.github.io/Ardens/player.html?file=https://example.com/game.hex&file=https://example.com/game.bin

The web builds of the debugger and player accept the following additional URL parameters (e.g., add &param1=value1&param2=value2 to the URL).

g or grid

Overlays the display with a grid to allow easier disambiguation of adjacent pixels. Values: none, normal, red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow, white

p or palette

Adjusts the color palette of the display. Values: default, retro, lowcontrast, highcontrast

af or autofilter

If enabled, applies temporal filtering to the display to help properly render grayscale games. Values: 0, 1

f or filter

(Debugger only) Conditionally applies an upscaling filter. Values: none, scale2x, scale3x, scale4x, hq2x, hq3x, hq4x

ds or downsample

(Debugger only) Downsamples by an integer ratio after applying an upsample filter. Values: 0, 1, 2, 3

ori or orientation

Rotates the display in 90 degree increments (directional button mapping is also rotated as if playing on a rotated Arduboy). Values:

• 0 or normal
• 90 or cw or cw90
• 180 or flip
• 270 or ccw or ccw90

v or volume

Sets the emulated audio gain. Value may be in the range 0 to 200, with 100 being the default.

size (Desktop only)

Sets the initial size of the application window. Value should be in the format <width>x<height> (for example, size=800x400).

i or intscale

Restricts the display scaling to an integral scaling factor. Defaults to false for the web player, and true for all other platforms.

c or current

Enables modeling the display row driver current limit. This effectively darkens rows that have many lit pixels. Defaults to false.

fxport

Sets the port to be used for the flash select. Values:

• 0 or d1 or fx (default)
• 1 or d2 or fxdevkit
• 2 or e2 or mini

display

Sets the type of emulated display. Values:

• 0 or ssd1306 (default)
• 1 or ssd1309
• 2 or sh1106

Libraries Used

• SDL (zlib)
• sokol (zlib)
• LLVM Project (Apache v2.0 with LLVM Exceptions)
• Dear ImGui (MIT)
• ImPlot (MIT)
• imgui_markdown (zlib)
• ImGuiColorTextEdit (MIT)
• Simple-FFT (MIT)
• brunexgeek/hqx (Apache v2.0)
• {fmt} (MIT)
• rapidjson (MIT)
• Miniz (MIT)
• Bitsery (MIT)
• stb_image_write (Public Domain)
• GIF encoder (Public Domain)
• AudioFile (MIT)
• Emscripten Browser File Library (MIT)
• Filewatch (MIT)