Pixstage

Pixstage is a tiny pixel buffer library built on top of wgpu.

It targets retro game emulators and software renderers, with two core goals:

• Retro-friendly: first-class Indexed8 + Palette rendering (palette lookup happens on the GPU).
• Fast uploads: dirty-rect tracking to avoid uploading the whole frame when only a small area changes.

Pixstage is windowing-framework-agnostic: any framework that supports raw-window-handle can be used.

Features

• PixstageRgba: RGBA8 pixel buffer with incremental texture updates
• PixstageIndexed: Indexed8 + Palette with GPU palette lookup (great for palette cycling)
• PixstageRgb565: RGB565 input with incremental upload (converted to RGBA8 only for dirty regions)
• PixstageArgb1555: ARGB1555 input with incremental upload (1-bit alpha)
• ScalingMode::PixelPerfect and ScalingMode::Fill
• PixstageOptions: shared configuration (backends/present_mode/scaling/clear_color)

Examples

• rectangle_and_line: simple drawing using PixstageRgba
• palette_cycle: palette animation using PixstageIndexed
• rgb565_checker: RGB565 input example using PixstageRgb565
• argb1555_alpha: ARGB1555 (1-bit alpha) example using PixstageArgb1555

Run:

cargo run --example rectangle_and_line
cargo run --example palette_cycle
cargo run --example rgb565_checker
cargo run --example argb1555_alpha

Minimal usage (winit)

use pixstage::{PixstageRgba, SurfaceTexture};
use winit::event_loop::EventLoop;
use winit::window::Window;

# let event_loop = EventLoop::new().unwrap();
# let window = Window::new(&event_loop).unwrap();
# let size = window.inner_size();
let surface = SurfaceTexture::new(size.width, size.height, &window)?;
let mut stage = PixstageRgba::new_async(320, 240, surface).await?;

// Write pixels
stage.set_pixel(10, 10, [255, 0, 0, 255]);
stage.render()?;
# Ok::<(), pixstage::Error>(())

Notes

• The examples use winit, but the library itself does not depend on it.