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RustBoyAdvance-NG

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Nintendo GameBoy Advance ™ emulator and debugger, written in rust.

Progress

Pokemon Emerald

Supported features:

  • Display modes 0,1,2,3,4
  • PCM Audio channels
  • Snapshots (AKA savestates)
  • Cartridge backup saves

Todo:

  • CGB audio (4 wave generator channels)
  • web.asm frontend
  • Andriod & IOS applications
  • color correction
  • Configurable keybindings
  • Controller support

Build and usage

The following instructions build the rba-sdl2 target which is currently the main platform. (rba-minifb is also available without audio support)

To get started, you need to get a stable rust toolchain.

Linux build dependencies

Install SDL2 dependencies

sudo apt-get -y install libsdl2-dev libsdl2-image-dev

Windows build dependencies

Download SDL2 runtime binaries for windows (either 32bit or 64bit depending on the target machine) https://www.libsdl.org/download-2.0.php https://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_image/

Extract all the DLLs into the project root (Yeah, its dirty and a build script will be written in the future to automate this)

Build & Usage

You need to obtain a gba bios binary. An open source GBA bios is also available and supported.

Place the bios file in the repository root and name it gba_bios.bin (or alternatively use the -b command line option)

Build and run in release mode (performance is terrible in the dev profile)

$ cargo run --release -- path/to/rom

You can also drag&drop rom files or any zip files containing .gba files inside into the emulator window and a new rom will be loaded.

Key bindings

Currently the key bindings are not configureable.

GBA key bindings:

Keyboard GBA
Up Up
Down Down
Left Right
Right Right
Z B Button
X A Button
Return Start
Backspace Select
A L
S R

Special key bindings

Key Function
Space (hold) Disable 60fps cap
F5 Save snapshot file
F9 Load snapshot file

Why is this project needed ?

It's actually not. There are quite a lot of GBA emulators, and even some written in rust. Actually, I couldn't find any game capable emulators written in rust.

I'm only doing this as a side project intended for learning rust.

This is my third take on this project. My first go at this was about 3 years ago, but I didn't like rust much at the time so it got abandoned. I tried to resurrect it a year ago but didn't have the time to get invested in a side-project, let alone learning rust.

I've grown to like rust a lot since then, so here we go again. You know what they say, third time's a charm.

More Screenshots

Kirby - Nightmare in Dreamland Dragon Ball - Legacy of Goku 2

Links and attribution

  • ARM7TDMI Technical Reference Manual Technical Reference Manuals are fun.
  • GBATEK A single webpage written by no$gba developer Martin Korth. This page has pretty much everything. Seriously, it's the best.
  • TONC A comprehensive GBA dev guide that I used a-lot in order to understand the GBA system. Comes with neat demo roms that really helped me during development and debugging.
  • NanoboyAdvance A GameBoy Advance emulator written in C++17 by a nice person called fleroviux. I've used this for debugging.
  • Eggvance gba-suite Incredible test suite for the arm7tdmi interpreter that I'm using, written by Julian Smolka.