CHIP-8 is a virtual machine, developed by Joseph Weisbecker. It was initially used on the COSMAC VIP and Telmac 1800 8-bit microcomputers in the mid-1970s. CHIP-8 programs are run on a CHIP-8 virtual machine. It was made to allow video games to be more easily programmed for these computers.
Each game has its own set of unique controls. It should be easy to figure them out though. The original CHIP-8 keys have been mapped to new keys on your keyboard. Below are the original and mapped controls
| 1 | 2 | 3 | C |
| 4 | 5 | 6 | D |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | E |
| A | 0 | B | F |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| Q | W | E | R |
| A | S | D | F |
| Z | X | C | V |
- Cowgod's Chip-8 Technical Reference
- CHIP-8 Wiki
- Chip-8 Test Rom
- Chip 8 Instruction Scheduling and Frequency
- Flickering is intentional, due to draw/clear calls being separate and sometimes many opcodes apart there is flickering. Due to this same reason double buffering is not possible, thus the screen flickers.
- CHIP-8 implementations are all over the place. Each emulator has its own slightly different way of doing things. I have followed the spec on Cowgod's reference, but not all games will run on the emulator properly. The
Romssubdirectory contains some simple programs I have tested that work with the emulator.
Some libraries were used in the making of this project, some are essential and others are just there for cleanliness. I will list all libraries and their functions below.
| Library | Function |
|---|---|
| jinput | Capturing user keyboard input |
| Lombok | Replacing getters/setters with annotations, lowers LoC significantly |
| Flatlaf | Look and Feel for Java GUI, makes things not ugly |
| Msgpack | Fast file serialization |
Due to using dependencies we require the maven build system, please make sure you have it installed first
- Open terminal in the project directory
- Run
mvn assembly:single
This should have created a target folder with a jar artifact.