Device emulator
In addition to physical hardware, a device emulator can be used for testing nileswan software. The current device emulator is a fork of the Mednafen emulator; however, it is maintained by us, so please do not ask Mednafen’s 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-medem nileswan.ipl0.
| Feature | Supported? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| SPI interface | Yes | |
| Power control | Yes | |
| SPI removable storage | Partial | Some commands only, <= 2 GiB only |
| SPI flash | Partial | Some commands only |
| MCU bootloader | Stubbed | MCU flash not stored |
| MCU native | Partial | Some commands only |
| MCU EEPROM | No | |
| MCU RTC | Stubbed | |
| MCU CDC transfer | Yes | Use wswan.excomm config option |
| IPC area | Yes | |
| Flash FSM | Yes |