Chip-8 Emulator

Implementing CHIP-8 emulator because I want to know how it works and also, it is fun. By all means, this is not supposed to be the most efficient implementation.

How to run

This code was developed with C++17, however it wasn't meant to use all bleeding edge features of that specification.

To build the project

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. && make # Use `make clean` for clean up.

This will create chip8Eml binary in /bin directory inside root directory.

Run

./chip8Eml PATH_TO_ROM

Functionality

There are just 2 basic operations you can do after running the Emulator

• Press ESC to exit the emulator
• Press SPACE to reload the ROM

Graphical Library

SDL2 was used as the library to draw graphics on the screen. Inside subdirectory libs/sdl2-2.0.14 the local build of SDL2 library should be placed (in case of issues on MacOS see below).

The code isn't tightly coupled with SDL2, so changing it to different library shouldn't be difficult.

Resources used

• Chip-8 Wiki
• Cowgod's Chip-8 Technical Reference
• Gynvael Coldwind's livestreams
• Guide to making a CHIP-8 emulator

Samples

The sample_roms directory contains games and programs that are using the small number of opcodes and just drawing text on the screen. More examples could be found here.

Issues with using SDL2

MacOS

When building SDL2 from source, you have probably got this issue after running the binary:

    dyld: Library not loaded: PATH_TO_LIB/libSDL2-2.0.0.dylib
    Referenced from: ./your_binary
    Reason: image not found

To resolve this, you can create a symbolic link to libSDL2-2.0.0.dylib in /usr/local/lib

Todo

• Add sound timer
• Add support for debugging the emulator.