rustboyadvance-ng/README.md

RustBoyAdvance-NG

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

Project Structure

• rustboyadvance-core/src - Main library crate
• bindings/ - Bindings to other languages. Currently only java binidings through JNI.
• platform/ - Constains executables & application built with rustboyadvance-core
  • platform/rustbodyadvance-wasm - Web emulator powered by WebAssembly
  • platform/rustbodyadvance-sdl2 - Desktop application built with sdl2
  • platform/rustbodyadvance-minifb - Desktop application built with minifb, not maintained.
  • platform/android - A PoC Android application.

Progress

Emulation Todo:

• CGB audio (4 wave generator channels)

Build and usage (Desktop Application)

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 -p rustboyadvance-sdl2 -- 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
F1	Custom debugger (requires --features debugger)
F2	Spawn gdbserver (experimetnal, requires --features gdb)
F5	Save snapshot file
F9	Load snapshot file

Android Application

The android project is placed inside platform/android. To build it, open it with Android Studio.

You also need to set up rust to build android targets with NDK.

TODO - instructions

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.