cheap-hate

A depressing Clojure interpreter for the CHIP-8 Virtual Machine.

Gallery

Here is BRIX. The best game ever made on this platform ! The player is really mediocre, he already lost 2 lives breaking only 3 bricks.

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Here is 15PUZZLE the most boring game ever invented.

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This is called BLINKY. Now put 3 meters between you and your screen. See? It's a Pacman clone.

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Usage

The gallery should have warn you. Games on Chip-8 are not fun. I mean it's black and white, blinky, no sound. They all are pale copies of other hits. The only reason you would play a Chip-8 game is if you are me and you want to wonder at the program you just wrote and tell you, "It's alive, alive !".

EDIT: There is actually a nice community of passionates that produces neat games each year for a jam. Please, have a look at the OctoJam.

But I can't refrain you of not being me and also wanting to play some Chip-8 games. So here is a quick guide.

Run on Linux

First of all, you must install leiningen. It's a single shell script, nothing to worry about.

Then clone this repo and jump into it.

Implementation of screen and keyboard is console based so you need to pimp your console a little before running any game comfortably.

xset r rate 100; \
clear; \
setterm --cursor off; \
stty -icanon -echo; \
~/bin/lein trampoline run qwerty roms/BRIX; \
xset r rate; \
setterm  --cursor on; \
stty sane

Just copy and paste. If you want an explanation, here we are :

• xset r rate 100 will set a delay of 100 ms for key repeat. This allows smooth inputs.

• clear clear the screen

• setterm --cursor off removes the cursor from the term

• stty -icanon -echo don't buffer inputs (the program doesn't have to wait the return key to get user input) and don't echo back user input on screen.

• lein trampoline run qwerty roms/BRIX; run arkanoïd clone in a new JVM. qwerty binds a qwerty keyboard layout. Use azerty if it happens you have a stupid azerty layout like I do. Roms are located under the roms directory. You may also specify a URL if you want.

• other commands restores the terminal to factory settings.

Run on Other Unices

I didn't try. If you try the linux, it may work. I don't care.

Run on Windows

There is a nice tutorial here.

Contributing

Sharing some code with you would be wonderful ! Hope make me live.

And if you happen to know Clojure, a code review would make my day. No, a whole year.

License

Copyright © 2016 Jérôme Prudent

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License either version 1.0 or (at your option) any later version.