Mechgah README

Why develop a new NES emulator?

This project is born in our engineering school (INSA Rennes, France) as part of a C language programming course. For one semester, in a team of four, we had to demonstrate our knowledge on a practical case. We had the choice of the subject, so we chose to develop a NES emulator because we thought (and it was) that it could train us on some aspect of computer architecture with the 6502 that NES use and, by the way, learn how gaming was in the past. This work was possible with the tons of documentation that is available on NESdev.

Our team is composed of:

• Baptiste Mehat (CPU, PPU)
• Nicolas Chabanis (CPU, Loader, Controller)
• Dylan Gageot (CPU, PPU, NROM Mapper)
• Nicolas Hily (CPU, Controller, SDL)

Dependencies

Our NES emulator depends on various library, which are:

• libsdl1.2-dev
• libsdl-gfx1.2-dev
• cmocka

You can install libsdl1.2-dev and libsdl-gfx1.2-dev with this command on Ubuntu :

sudo apt install libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-gfx1.2-dev

Makefile

make            # build mechgah executable (you can precise mechgah)
make run-test   # build unit test and run it with Valgrind
                # and code coverage feature
make doc        # build Doxygen documentation from doxyfile
make clean      # clean every generated file (including coverage and doc dir)

CMake

Run the following command to compile this project through CMake:

cmake . -Bbuild
cd build
make mechgah    # build mechgah executable
make utest      # build unit test

If you want to launch unit tests, run ./build/utest from the root of the repository (that is because our unit tests use relative path for file opening). If you are using CLion, precise executables working directory to root path.

User manual

Synopsis

./mechgah [OPTION]... [ROM]

Description

Launches the NES emulator on the given ROM filename and with the given OPTION. If no ROM filename is given, the emulator won't launch. If multiple filenames are given, the emulator will launch with the first one.

Options

-s [scale]
  Defines the scaling factor. Must be between 1 (genuine resolution) and 15 (4K resolution).
  If not specified, scaling factor is set to 2.

Screenshot

Todo

• Add APU
• Add mappers
• Enhance PPU behavior (optimization with prediction algorithm)
• Troubleshoot Controller (aren't working after a Game Over on Super Mario Bros.)