Rust boy advance for python

[wissammm]

For a personal reinforcement learning project, I had to make a python module of rust boy advance that manages access to the gba object and can also write to and read from memory, and stop when a value at an address is modified.

My module doesn't handle rendering or inputs.

Could a python module (platform/rustboy-adavance-ng-py) be useful for the project, given that no other gba emulator does this? (mgba-py doesn't work).

[michelhe]

That is a fantastic thing to add to this project, and something I wanted to do myself long time ago! Now parenthood got the better of me and I don't have much free time to play around with this emulator as much as I wanted to.

Are you using pyo3 for that ^^?

[wissammm]

Congratulations to the new dad! I can take care of it as soon as I've finished my project. For the moment I've got a fork that's a bit dirty, but I can make a new, cleaner branch and add the changes to manage the python module.
For the redering I'll turn to pygame or arcade, so that the rendering, sound and inputs are managed directly by these two libraries. I haven't touched these parts yet, but I'll see if I use other, lower-level alternatives like pysdl.
Here's an example of what I can already do with pyo3:

import rustboyadvance_py
import utils.parser
import utils.pokemon_data
import time
import pandas as pd

ROM_PATH = "pokeemerald_ai_rl/pokeemerald_modern.elf"
BIOS_PATH = "rustboyadvance-ng-for-rl/gba_bios.bin"
STEPS = 32000

parser = utils.parser.MapAnalyzer('pokeemerald_ai_rl/pokeemerald_modern.map')

gba = rustboyadvance_py.RustGba()
gba.load(BIOS_PATH,ROM_PATH )

addrs = {
   'stopHandleTurn': int(parser.get_address('stopHandleTurn'), 16),
   'monDataEnemy': int(parser.get_address('monDataEnemy'), 16),
}

name_by_addr = {v: k for k, v in addrs.items()}

gba.add_stop_addr(addrs['stopHandleTurn'],1,True,'stopHandleTurn')
cpt = 0

while(1):
   steps_does = gba.run_to_next_stop(STEPS)
   if cpt%10000 == 0:
       print(f"Steps done: {steps_does}")
   if steps_does == -1:
       print("Player data:")
       print(utils.pokemon_data.to_pandas_mon_dump_data(gba.read_u32_list(addrs['monDataPlayer'],36)))
       
   cpt+= 1

print("end")

Update: it was really easy with my previous work to get the render buffer get_frame_buffer(), and use it inside a pygame env, hope that sound and input handling is also easy.