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nes

A NES emulator, so that I can waste a lot of time playing old games, but also feel like I did something constructive.

I've tried to keep the code as simple as possible, have included relevant links to the NesDev Wiki in the comments, and have added extra comments from other documentation sources in order to facilitate others in learning how the NES works.

An accompanying blog post can be read here: https://ltriant.github.io/2019/11/22/nes-emulator.html

It's dangerous to go alone. Take this!

Limitations

Only a subset of the full system has been emulated. The following limitations apply, in order of most likely to be fixed:

  1. Sunsoft 5B sound support isn't added, but the only game that uses the extra sound channels, Gimmick!, plays fine (and is awesome)
  2. No PAL cartridge support
  3. No second controller support

The following cartridge mappers are supported:

  1. NROM (mapper 0)
  2. MMC1/SxROM (mapper 1)
  3. UxROM (mapper 2)
  4. CNROM (mapper 3)
  5. MMC3/TxROM (mapper 4)
  6. AxROM (mapper 7)
  7. BxROM/NINA-001 (mapper 34)
  8. GxROM (mapper 66)
  9. Sunsoft-4 (mapper 68)
  10. Sunsoft FME-7/5a/5b (mapper 69)

Building and Running

SDL2 is required for the graphics, and it can be installed via many different package managers:

$ brew install sdl2
$ sudo apt-get install libsdl2-dev
$ sudo yum install SDL2-devel

Or see the libsdl installation documentation for more options.

The emulator is written in Rust, so the easiest way to build it is with Cargo.

$ cargo build --release

The emulator can then be run by supplying the path to the ROM as an argument:

$ target/release/nes roms/donkey_kong.nes

Controller 1 Keys

Up     -- W
Left   -- A
Down   -- S
Right  -- D

A      -- N
B      -- M

Start  -- Enter
Select -- Space

P      -- Pause

F12    -- Reset

Debugging Information

Some graphical debugging information can be displayed by toggling the NES_PPU_DEBUG environment variable. At the moment this shows the palettes and the pattern table information.

$ NES_PPU_DEBUG=1 cargo run --release -- roms/donkey_kong.nes

To get full CPU debugging output printed to standard output, the NES_CPU_DEBUG environment variable can be toggled.

$ NES_CPU_DEBUG=1 cargo run -- roms/donkey_kong.nes

In order to run the nestest ROM, the CPU debugging output can be combined with the NES_CPU_NESTEST environment variable to also start the program counter at 0xc000.

$ NES_CPU_NESTEST=1 NES_CPU_DEBUG=1 cargo run -- roms/nestest.nes

Enabling of individual sound channels can be achieved with the NES_APU_CHANNELS environment variable. This value is an 8-bit bitmask with a bit for each channel and combinations of channels may be enabled this way. The bits are:

Square 1 = 1
Square 2 = 2
Triangle = 4
Noise    = 8
DMC      = 16

As an example:

$ NES_APU_CHANNELS=5 cargo run --release roms/zelda.nes

This will enable the first square wave channel, and the triangle wave.