chip8-emu-rust

A CHIP-8 emulator written in the Rust programming language.

Building

To build the emulator you need a Rust toolchain and the SDL2 bindings available on your system.

Once installed, run the build using Cargo:

$ git clone https://github.com/alberto-re/chip8-emu-rust
$ cd chip8-emu-rust
$ cargo build --release
$ ./target/release/chip8-emu-rust --version
chip8-emu-rust 1.0.0

Running the emulator

Running the emulator is pretty straightforward, just specify using the --rom option the ROM to load at startup:

./target/release/chip8-emu-rust --rom roms/INVADERS

You can tweak the emulation speed and display scaling factor if needed. Add the --help option to see all the options available:

./target/release/chip8-emu-rust --help
A CHIP-8 emulator

Usage: chip8-emu-rust [OPTIONS] --rom <ROM>

Options:
  -r, --rom <ROM>
      --speed <SPEED>  [default: 1000]
      --scale <SCALE>  [default: 16]
  -h, --help           Print help
  -V, --version        Print version

Keys

The original CHIP-8 specification had a 16 key hexadecimal keypad with the following layout:

1	2	3	c
4	5	6	d
7	8	9	e
a	0	b	f

The layout has been remapped onto a standard keyboard this way:

1	2	3	4
q	w	e	r
a	s	d	f
z	x	c	v

References

There are plenty of information about CHIP-8 available, here are the sources that I consulted the most:

• Cowgod's Chip-8 Technical Reference
• CHIP-8 Wikipedia Page
• CHIP-8 test suite