SF: Rust on Nintendo 64

[parasyte]

I attended the Rust Bay Area meetup a few times in the past, and have watched some recordings online. Really good stuff, all around.

I want to propose a talk for a project I have been working on recently; using Rust to write games and applications on Nintendo 64 hardware!

The talk outline currently looks something like this:

• Bootstrapping
  • no_std free-standing binaries targeting MIPS architecture
  • Writing a custom target triple
  • Writing a linker script
  • Writing a custom build tool as a cargo subcommand
• Dependencies
  • Writing a small crate to configure the runtime environment (e.g. crt0)
  • Writing a library crate to handle hardware I/O (e.g. drivers) - here be unsafe
• Hello world
  • Writing a basic binary crate that prints text to the screen
  • Adding simple animations
  • Adding sound and music
• Live demo on a 22-year-old Nintendo 64!
• TODO list and things to look forward to
  • No heap allocation :(
  • No threads :(
  • Very experimental/using unstable features

This is a project I have been working on for a little over a week. It shouldn't be unreasonable to condense the material into an hour presentation. I haven't actually announced the project anywhere, but it will all be open sourced (MIT), certainly by the time the talk is ready.

It isn't really a typical use case for Rust, but I believe it would be interesting for a few reasons; first because Rust hasn't targeted Nintendo 64 before (to my knowledge), and second because there are some details that can be challenging when bootstrapping a new target platform.

Thoughts, opinions?

[Chris--B]

I just stumbled across this from Google and would be very interested in seeing this information as a talk or a blog post series. Has this outline become something concrete?