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.

1. Download or compile the device emulator.
2. 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-emu command; in this case, the package will be placed in the out/emulator directory.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Run the emulator: nileswan-... nileswan.ipl0.