Device emulator
In addition to physical hardware, a device emulator can be used for testing nileswan software. There are two options available:
- nileswan-medem, a fork of the Mednafen emulator.
- nileswan-mesem, a fork of the MesenCE emulator. More capable and accurate, but currently experimental.
These forks are maintained by us, so please do not ask the original/upstream developers questions about it.
The main advantage of the device emulator is that it allows much more rapid test cycles on a development computer. In addition, stepping and breakpoint functionality is provided for debugging. The main disadvantage is that the emulator only implements a limited subset of both the console and the cartridge’s functionality.
- Download or compile the device emulator.
- Prepare the emulator files. This can be done by either:
- downloading a ready-made build of the package,
- compiling the package from source by using the
make dist-emucommand; in this case, the package will be placed in theout/emulatordirectory.
- Place the emulator files in a directory of your choosing. You should have the following files:
nileswan.ipl0- a build of the IPL0 (first-stage loader),nileswan.spi- a replica of the SPI flash image,nileswan.img- a pre-formatted FAT32 image, emulating the removable storage card.
- Use a tool of choice (for example,
mount -o loop nileswan.img ...on Linux) to mount the pre-formatted FAT32 image and edit its contents. - Run the emulator:
nileswan-... nileswan.ipl0.
| Feature | nileswan-medem | nileswan-mesem | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| SPI interface | Yes | Yes | |
| Power control | Yes | Yes | |
| SPI removable storage | Partial | Partial | Some commands only, <= 2 GiB only |
| SPI flash | Partial | Partial | Some commands only |
| MCU bootloader | Stubbed | Stubbed | MCU flash not stored |
| MCU native | Partial | Partial | Some commands only |
| MCU EEPROM | No | No | |
| MCU RTC | Partial | Partial | |
| MCU CDC transfer | Yes | No | On medem, use wswan.excomm config option |
| MCU accelerometer | Stubbed | Stubbed | |
| IPC area | Yes | Yes | |
| Flash FSM | Yes | Yes |