rNES - Yet another Nintendo Entertainment System emulator

rNES it's yet another NES emulator which has as it main goals:

• Accuracy to real hardware
• Low memory footprint
• High portability across platforms

Currently rNES implements mappers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 7, supporting thousands of NES games.

How to build

POSIX systems

Currently only an interface using lib SDL is implemented. On a Debian family system, make sure to install the following packages:

• libsdl2-dev
• libsdl2-ttf-dev

rNES can be built by calling make from src directory:

cd src
make

To run rNES just call:

./rNES <rom_file>

The following options are supported:

Use: ./rNES [-s <scale_factor>] [-d] [-h] <rom_file>

    -s, --scale      Set screen scale factor (default: 2)
    -d, --debug      Show debug messages (it can be extremely slow!)
    -i, --info       Just show ROM information (don't play the game)
    -v, --version    Show version
    -l, --license    Show license
    -h, --help       Show this help

Windows (cross-compile)

A static version for Windows can be cross-compiled on Linux using the MinGW-w64 toolchain.

The script build-win32-cross.sh builds the cross-compiler environment with SDL2 and SDL2_ttf libraries.

First, ensure you have the MinGW-w64 toolchain installed (x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc and x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++ must be available on the host system).

On Debian the following packages must be installed: gcc-mingw-w64 and g++-mingw-w64:

sudo apt install -y gcc-mingw-w64 g++-mingw-w64

Run the build-win32-cross.sh script to create the build environment:

cd src
./scripts/build-win32-cross.sh

Once the environment is ready, rNES.exe can be built using make:

make -f Makefile.mingw

Tools

Palette Editor

rNES provides an easy to use PalleteEditor that can be found in tools/PaletteEditor. The tool be built with cmake (Qt6 is required):

cd tools/PaletteEditor/
cmake .
make
./PaletteEditor

The tool is straightforward to use, you can create a new palette or load an existent one (.pal file, no headers, just a sequence of RGB color data for all 64 entries). Just click on the squares to change the color.

PaletteEditor interface.

Developing rNES

Developers are really encouraged to develop and contribute to rNES. For detailed information and porting guide, consult the Developer Documentation.

Source code documentation can be generated with Doxygen:

cd src
make docs

The generated documentation will be available in different formats at src/docs/dist.