RustBoyAdvance-NG
Nintendo GameBoy Advance ™ emulator and debugger, written in rust.
WebAssembly Demo: https://michelhe.github.io/rustboyadvance-ng/ 
Project Structure
core/- Main emulator crate that ties everything togetherarm7tdmi/- Emulation of the Arm7tdmi processor.platform/- Constains executables & application built withrustboyadvance-coreplatform/rustbodyadvance-wasm- Web emulator powered by WebAssemblyplatform/rustbodyadvance-sdl2- Desktop application built with sdl2platform/rustbodyadvance-minifb- Desktop application built with minifb, not maintained.platform/rustbodyadvance-jni- Java JNI binidngs for the emulator.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 of version Rust 1.51 or later,
Linux build dependencies
Install SDL2 dependencies
sudo apt-get -y install libsdl2-dev libsdl2-image-devWindows build dependencies
SDL2 runtime binaries are included in this repository, no extra setup needed.
macOS
Install SDL2 dependencies
brew install SDL2 SDL2_image
export LIBRARY_PATH="$LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/homebrew/lib"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 -- path/to/romYou 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.