Rusty Chip-8

The Hello World of Emulation, made in your favourite memory-safe Rust.

Installation

You need only SDL2 package and Cargo to run the project!

Run sudo apt-get install libsdl2-dev to install SDL2 and follow this guide to install Cargo!

After the above setup, you can start playing the games with the following commands:

cd desktop
cargo run ../roms/[GAME_NAME]

Chip 8 Specifications

• A 64x32 monochrome display, drawn to via sprites that are always 8 pixels wide and between 1 and 16 pixels tall
• Sixteen 18-bit general purpose registers, referred to as V0 through VF. (VF also doubles as the flag register for overflow operations)
• 16-bit program counter
• Single 16-bit register used as a pointer for memory access, called the I Register
• An unstandardised amount of RAM (most emulators allocate 4 KB)
• 16-bit stack used for calling and returning from subroutines
• 16-key keyboard input

Two special registers which decrease each frame and trigger upon reaching zero are also present:

1. Delay timer: Used for time-based game events
2. Sound timer: Used to trigger the audio beep

About the Project

The project has two main directories.

1. chip8: This is a library package with holds all the code for the CHIP8 Emulator
2. desktop: This is a binary application package which would be using the chip8 emulator to run games!

Scopes of Improvement

• Add better comments for all the OP Codes
• Rename classes and variables to standard CPU names
• Add more ROMS
• Add WASM integration
• Add tests for each of the OP Codes and methods
• Add frontend to play the games