This project represents an emulator and associated assembler for the Chip-8 instruction set. The emulator is written in C, and is implemented in cpu_chip_8.c. The assembler is written in Python (2.7.9) and is implemented in py8_assembler.py
Use the provided Makefile to compile the chip_8 emulator binary. chip_8 relies on ncurses to draw the screen and receive keystrokes; the ncurses library can be installed with
$ sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev
The grammar for the assembly language can be found in grammar.txt. The assembler supports labels for jumps and calls, and comments (lines beginning with #). An example usage is:
$ python py8_assembler.py timer.chasm timer.ch8
The binary file timer.ch8 will be created.
Using this timer.ch8 file that was just produced, the emulator can be run with:
$ ./chip_8 timer.ch8
Correct behavior of this command is the emulator runs, producing no output, for roughly one second before halting normally (the actual runtime will be closer to 1.1 seconds, since we must wait for pthread memory to be cleaned up).
The documentation for the chip-8 instruction set comes mainly from: http://devernay.free.fr/hacks/chip8/C8TECH10.HTM