bakervm / bakervm

A virtual machine for building and running retro games

bakerVM

A virtual machine for building and running retro games

Introduction

The bakerVM is a virtual machine that executes bakerVM bytecode.

A builder-like compiler backend for the vm can be found in core/image_builder.rs.

The executable images of the vm are encoded and decoded using MessagePack

NOTE THAT THIS SOFTWARE IS STILL UNDER HEAVY DEVELOPMENT AND IN NO WAY STABLE OR COMPLETE.

Installation

Install sdl2

On Ubuntu:

sudo apt install libsdl2-dev

On macOS:

brew install sdl2

The toolchain doesn't support Windows yet

Install the toolchain

To get the newest version of the bakerVM toolchain, first you have to install Rust. The Project is currently tracking stable Rust. After you installed Rust and Cargo correctly, install the toolchain using the following command:

cargo install bakervm

If you already installed an older version you have to force the installation:

cargo install bakervm -f

After the installation, you should have the following binaries installed: bakervm and hudson.

hudson is the bakervm toolkit. It is currently only able to compile *.basm files.

hudson compile path/to/source.basm

bakervm is the VM itself. On startup it loads the stock image by default. But you can specify any bakerVM image:

bakervm path/to/my/image/game.img

bakervm's Issues

Add contributors guide

Create the `Shell` trait

Create a trait which allows devs to implement their own I/O system around the actual VM while using the same instruction set

trait Shell {
    type Error;

    /// Is called right before the VM executes code
    fn prepare(&mut self, &mut VM) -> Result<(), Self::Error>;
    /// Sends the given buffer to the shell
    fn send_buffer(&mut self, &Buffer) -> Result<(), Self::Error>;
    /// Receives and handles an event
    fn receive_event(&mut self, &Event) -> Result<(), Self::Error>;
}

Build fuzzing pipeline in TravisCI

Because of the nature of virtual machines I have to write a fuzzing API that generates instructions based on popular patterns and tests them against the VM

Encode assets into program image

Handle static data more properly

Includes are not recognizing directories properly

Standardize interrupt signals

Key Register

HashMap<Address, ()>

Write more tests

Add config struct

Implement interrupt handling

Refine BakerVM assembly language

I really want to see BASM to be more easy to understand so I'm thinking about creating a HLA as a superset of BASM

Expand README.md

The current README.md doesn't really describe the project. It should be expanded to do so and also describe goals and non-goals.

Move core computing module into definitions/core

For a while now I'm thinking of moving out the actual VM part of the BakerVM and putting it into a library form with the bakervm executable as a frontend to the actual computing. With this I sooner or later intent to move the BakerVM core into its own library so everyone might be able to use the core for some arbitrary computation.

Enhance memory allocation

Write bytecode spec

Remove compilation code from `core`

There is still a lot of code in core that belong to the time when the compiler and the data consumed by the VM were very close. The core library should be as abstract as possible allowing for an clean reimplementation of the original VM.