Writing a Nintendo 64 emulator in Rust
summary
A Nintendo 64 emulator in Rust exists as a work‑in‑progress: CPU interpreter runs MIPS instructions by fixed time slices (emulating a ~200 MHz CPU, 4 MB RAM, cartridges up to 64 MB) with fine-grained line interleaving for raster effects; compilation uses a generic MIPS trait in Rust to eliminate unused opcodes at compile time and LLVM intrinsics for hot paths; devices use a thread‑local device map with one unsafe line and a radix tree bus for fast mapping; correctness relies on golden tests run on a 64drive against real hardware.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Intro
- 2:18How videogames work
- 10:10Nintendo 64
- 16:38CPU interpreter loop
- 18:30CPU opcode decoder
- 18:58CPU opcode interpreter
- 22:03CPU architecture trait
- 31:19Device access
- 34:18Memory map: emulation
- 36:57Memory map: radix tree
- 39:48A little beast
- 42:05HLE: high level emulation
- 45:18Golden tests
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