noun
ne·science | \ˈne-sh(ē-)ən(t)s, ˈnē-, -sē-ən(t)s
lack of knowledge or awareness: IGNORANCE
Nescient, stylized NEScient if you're having a bad day and would like to be right on the internet for once, is a NES emulator with a simple implementation and good performance, written in Rust, inspired by fogleman/nes.
The goal of this project is of two parts:
- To write a fast 'n functional NES emulator with minimal dependencies and clear cut behavior. No cruft or magic is allowed.
- To write a small WASM backend for nescient, so it runs in the browser.
I've had some experience with WASM in the past—I'm planning to use Vulkan as the graphics engine, and still need to work out which audio engine and input libraries to use. so I'm primarily focused on that at the moment.
I'm not sure if vulkan is the best choice—all I'm really doing is creating a window, and writing a frame buffer.
- Read through, port, and clean up fogleman/nes to Rust, to get a loose idea of NES emulator semantics.
- Looking through the implementation, I see some easy things that could be cleaned up, and if brainwill/nes is any indication, there are quite a few improvements that there can be made to the architecture of the emulator without changing behavior.
- Fix any large performance bottlenecks.
- Maybe get WASM working.