This is an implementation of an emulator of a chip supporting the CHIP-8 instruction set. For graphical output, it relies on the cursive text user interface library.
The emulator is written in Rust. For a guide on getting started with Rust, refer to this page. Once you made it through the instructions there you should be able to run the emulator.
The emulator takes the path to the CHIP-8 program to be executed. For example, it can be run as follows.
cargo run [path-to-chip-8-program]
The emulator also comes with a test suite. It can be invoked via the following command.
cargo test
To build a binary, one can run cargo build --release.
Running cargo run ./programs/hello-world.ch8 will execute the hello world
program distributed with this emulator and result in the output shown below.
CHIP-8 has 16 input pins (0x0 - 0xF). They can be set using keys according to the
mapping below.
Key (Mapping) |
Key (Mapping) |
Key (Mapping) |
Key (Mapping) |
|---|---|---|---|
1 (0x1) |
2 (0x2) |
3 (0x3) |
4 (0xC) |
Q (0x4) |
W (0x5) |
E (0x6) |
R (0xD) |
A (0x7) |
S (0x8) |
D (0x9) |
F (0xE) |
Z (0xA) |
X (0x0) |
C (0xB) |
V (0xF) |
Given that OS X requires special permissions to listen to key-release events, we decided to work around this by mapping the space bar as a key-release bar. So once a key is pressed it will remain set until the space bar is hit. Pressing escape will quit the emulator.