RustedNES is a Nintendo Entertainment System emulator written in the Rust programming language. It runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. It currently supports many commercial games.
To build RustedNES you will need to have have Rust installed. You can find instructions here https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/install.html
For the SDL frontend you will also need SDL2 installed. For Ubuntu that can be done like this:
sudo apt install libsdl2-dev
Then run the following in the project directory to build:
cargo build --release
Note: the release flag may be necessary to get playable speed.
There are currently 2 different ways to run RustedNES. There is a simple SDL frontend, and a libretro core that can be used with RetroArch or other libretro frontends.
The SDL interface is simple to use, but it's not configurable. To run with more features, see libretro below.
The built executable can be found in the target/release directory. The file is named rustednes-sdl (with .exe extension on Windows).
To play a game, simply pass the ROM file as an argument.
$ rustednes-sdl --help
An SDL2 frontend for rustednes-core
Usage: rustednes-sdl [OPTIONS] <ROM>
Arguments:
<ROM> The name of the ROM to load
Options:
-d, --debug Start in debug mode
--noaudio Disable audio
-v, --verbose... More output per occurrence
-q, --quiet... Less output per occurrence
-h, --help Print help information
-V, --version Print version information
Here are the keyboard controls:
| Button | Key |
|---|---|
| Left | left |
| Right | right |
| Up | up |
| Down | down |
| Select | space |
| Start | enter/return |
| A | X |
| B | Z |
Using RustedNES with a libretro frontend, such as RetroArch, allows many additional features, such as:
- Save states
- SRAM saving
- Changing window size / fullscreen
- Gamepads and other input devices
- Configurable buttons
- Cheats
To run on RetroArch you will need to find the shared library of the libretro core that was created in the build step. You can find it in the target/release directory. The name of the file will be different depending on the platform:
rustednes_libretro.dllon Windowslibrustednes_libretro.dylibon MacOSlibrustednes_libretro.soon Linux
You need to pass that file as an argument after -L, as in the following example for MacOS:
retroarch -L librustednes_libretro.dylib name_of_rom.nes
Duel-license under MIT license (LICENSE-MIT), or Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE)
Thanks to the people who created the following emulator projects, which were used for ideas and inspiration for this project:
- https://github.com/emu-rs/rustual-boy (Virtual Boy emulator written in Rust)
- https://github.com/pcwalton/sprocketnes (NES emulator written in Rust)
- https://github.com/fogleman/nes (NES emulator written in Go)
Also thanks to nesdev.com for all of the awesome resources on their wiki: http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Nesdev_Wiki