NES Emulator in Rust

This project is my personal take on creating a NES emulator written in Rust. The goal is to faithfully recreate the experience of playing NES games, leveraging Rust's safety and performance features.

Features

This emulator is currently a work in progress. The following features are implemented or planned:

• CPU: The central processing unit, responsible for running the game's instructions.

• PPU (Picture Processing Unit): The graphics processing unit, which will handle rendering the game's visuals.

• APU (Audio Processing Unit): The audio processing unit, which will handle the game's sound.

• Mapper 0: The simplest memory mapper, often used in early NES games.

• Mapper 1: A more complex memory mapper that allows for more advanced games.

• Mapper 2: Another type of memory mapper used in various NES games.

• Mapper 3: To be implemented.

• Mapper 4: To be implemented.

• Mapper 5: To be implemented.

• Mapper 6: To be implemented.

• Mapper 7: To be implemented.

• Debugger gui implementation

Usage

Prerequisites

Before you can build and run the emulator, you need to have the following installed:

• Rust (nightly): The Rust programming language toolchain, specifically the nightly version, which includes the latest features and improvements.
• custom_error crate: This Rust crate is used for error handling in the emulator.

Build

To build the project, navigate to the project directory and run the following command:

cargo build --release

This will compile the emulator in release mode, which optimizes the code for better performance.

Run

To run the emulator with a specific ROM file, use the following command:

cargo run --release -- <path-to-rom>

Replace <path-to-rom> with the path to the ROM file you want to load. This will start the emulator and load the specified ROM.

References

For more information on the NES architecture and development, you can refer to the following resources:

• NES Reference Guide: A comprehensive guide to the NES hardware and software.
• NES Documentation: A detailed document covering various aspects of NES development.

These references provide valuable insights and technical details that are essential for developing an NES emulator.

Credits

This project was inspired by several other NES emulator projects. I would like to acknowledge the following projects for their inspiration and guidance:

• fogleman/nes: An NES emulator written in Go, which served as a great reference for my project.
• pcwalton/sprocketnes: Another NES emulator that provided useful insights and ideas for my implementation.

Their work has been instrumental in shaping this project and I am grateful for their contributions to the NES emulator community.