rusty-boy

A Gameboy emulator and related tools in Rust

It's currently in a very unstable state.

Made live on twitch.tv/maoeurk (Unfortunately I'm not currently streaming, but I'd like to resume in the near future)

WARNING

V0.1.1 introduces a lot of instability and has many regressions

Don't expect it to work outside of a development context at this stage.

Contributions welcome!

About

Project done for fun and learning about Rust and project management.

Memory visualization inspired by ICU64 / Frodo Redpill v0.1

V0.1.0: image of memory visualization of Tetris.

V0.1.0: Game, Popup, running with the ncurses debugger.

State of the project

Things came up and I stopped developing this and streaming. The primary reason being that the change from 0.1.0 to 0.2.0 was too large and became unmanageable.

Current goals:

Reduce scope of project
Rewrite rendering and visualization to be GPU based (Vulkan or OpenGL)
Finish rendering (sprite flipping, textboxes)
Rewrite sound (properly and with visualizations)
Refactor CPU, memory management, and IO (basically the entire project)
Optimize CPU execution (high level JIT? no machine code generation, just recompiled to a more performant bytecode) if it's a performance bottleneck
Fix usability bugs (rebindable keys, some kind of more complete controller support)
Fix regressions introduced in 0.1.1 (Tetris crashes now ;_;)

Non goals:

Fancy compilers, assemblers, and debug/dev tools (I'll add support for these in a decoupled way if I actually finish the tasks above)
Full support for extra features (like the camera)

= Be a better product than existing emulators (I'm sure there are much nicer emulators for playing games. Usability is not a primary goal at this time)

Building

First install libsdl2-dev. If you're new to Rust, install rustup to install rustc and cargo.

You may need to install ncurses libraries to compile this project. TODO: test and update this

Then just run:

cd rusty-boy
cargo install

and you should be up and running.

Running

To run, run the following command:

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

To run with the TUI debugger, run:

cargo run --release --features=debugger -- /path/to/rom -d

To run with the debugger, run: