4.2 KiB
RustBoyAdvance-NG
Nintendo GameBoy Advance ™ emulator and debugger, written in rust.
Progress
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
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.