sprocketnes is an emulator for the Nintendo Entertainment System written in
the Rust programming language.
Its purpose is to serve as a technology demonstration to show how the Rust
programming language is suitable for systems software such as emulators. It
has many shortcomings and is not intended to be a production-quality emulator.
sprocketnes is also designed to be a relatively clean example codebase,
showing off various Rust idioms.
The Rust garbage collector is not used in this project, and unsafe code is kept to a minimum.
The NES was chosen for this project because:
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It's familiar to most hackers.
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It's a reasonably simple system to emulate.
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Because of its popularity, its workings are relatively well-documented.
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It's CPU-bound, so it can serve as a benchmark to help optimize Rust code.
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The audio requires some measure of real-time operation, which tests Rust's real-time capabilities.
The main controls are as follows:
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A: Z
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B: X
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Start: Enter
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Select: Right shift
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D-Pad: Arrows
Other keys:
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Save state: S
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Load state: L
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Quit: Escape
If you want to build sprocketnes, you will first need rust-sdl, available
at https://github.com/brson/rust-sdl. You will also need the Speex codec
library installed; on the Mac you can install it with brew install speex.
Finally, you will also need the Rust master branch; no Rust release can build
sprocketnes.
To build (add -O if you actually want playable speed):
rustc nes.rs -L<SDL-LIB>
There are numerous demos and games available for free for use with this emulator at http://nesdev.com/.
Enjoy!