Rustual Boy is a Virtual Boy emulator. It can be used to play existing Virtual Boy games, as well as be a helpful development/debugging tool for homebrew for this platform.
The name "Rustual Boy" is a portmanteau of the words "Rust" and "Virtual Boy". Ok, the "Virtual Boy" part was obvious, but why "Rust"? In fact, Rustual Boy is written in the Rust programming language - a "systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety." Rust is a wonderful language with a thriving community, and as such provides a fantastic platform for an emulation project!
Rustual Boy is currently able to emulate the majority of commercial Virtual Boy titles, as well as many homebrew ones as well. It supports basic video/audio output and keyboard input, as well as a simple CLI debugger. It runs on Windows, MacOS, Linux, and likely other platforms Rust supports as well.
While Rustual Boy's core emulation is nearly complete compatibility-wise, the project is still quite young, and needs some time to mature. Particularly, its user interface is lacking (read: virtually non-existent), and there are some known (and probably unknown) stability/compatibility issues. Also, performance isn't fantastic yet, but the emulator should be playable at least.
That said, these things are bound to improve with time, and everyone is encouraged to grab a build or build the emulator, give it a shot, and report any bugs/feature requests!
Key:
- Empty cells: Incompatible. The reason is described in the notes field.
- 💖: Fully compatible. The game is fully playable with no known bugs (to our knowledge).
- 💔: Playable. The game can be played, but has some minor known glitches (described in the notes field).
N/A: Game does not exist for this region.
Games marked 💖 and 💔 are all included in the compatibility metric.
| Game | USA | JP | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3-D Tetris | 💖 | N/A | |
| Bound High! | 💖 | N/A | ROM is both USA+JP |
| Galactic Pinball | 💔 | 💔 | Vocal samples throughout the game play at the wrong rate, likely related to CPU clock cycle inaccuracy |
| Golf | 💔 | 💔 | Game seems to softlock randomly in demo mode, game transitions to demo mode WAY too fast |
| Insmouse No Yakata | N/A | 💖 | |
| Jack Bros. | 💖 | 💖 | |
| Mario Clash | 💖 | 💖 | |
| Mario's Tennis | Severe graphical glitches when switching between game screens | ||
| Nester's Funky Bowling | N/A | Screen goes black after initial warning screen, appears to softlock | |
| Panic Bomber | 💖 | 💖 | |
| Red Alarm | 💖 | 💖 | |
| SD Gundam Dimension War | N/A | 💖 | |
| Space Invaders Virtual Collection | N/A | Lazers aren't visible on most of the screen in "Virtual 3D" mode | |
| Space Squash | N/A | 💖 | |
| Teleroboxer | 💔 | 💔 | Small audio glitches during screen transitions after demo mode wins games |
| V-Tetris | N/A | 💖 | |
| Vertical Force | 💖 | 💖 | |
| Virtual Bowling | N/A | 💔 | Samples play at the wrong rate |
| Virtual Boy Wario Land | 💖 | 💖 | |
| Virtual Fishing | N/A | 💖 | |
| Virtual Lab | N/A | 💖 | |
| Virtual League Baseball | 💖 | 💖 | |
| Waterworld | 💖 | N/A |
Currently, the only dependency for building is Rust itself, which can be downloaded here. Once that's installed, you can clone the repo, and simply cargo build/cargo run your way to victory! It's recommended to use the --release flag as well, as emulation can require a lot of CPU power, so we'll want all the compiler help we can get.
Rustual Boy currently takes a single argument, which is the ROM image:
rustual-boy bound-high.vb
If you're new to using Cargo (Rust's build system), it's recommended to give the Cargo Guide a quick skim.
The Virtual Boy game pad consists of two d-pads, 4 buttons, and two shoulder buttons. These are mapped to the following keyboard keys:
| Button | Key |
|---|---|
| Left D-Pad Up | W |
| Left D-Pad Down | S |
| Left D-Pad Left | A |
| Left D-Pad Right | D |
| Right D-Pad Up | I |
| Right D-Pad Down | K |
| Right D-Pad Left | J |
| Right D-Pad Right | L |
| Select | space |
| Start | enter/return |
| A | F |
| B | H |
| Left bumper | E |
| Right bumper | U |
For game pad layout reference, refer to this image. This key map is currently non-configurable.
Rustual Boy aims to be an open project where anyone can contribute. If you're interested, check CONTRIBUTING.md!
Licensed under either of
- Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
- MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
at your option.