Kill the C version, and let the Zig version be born

— Aemon Targaryen (probably)

chip8z

A CHIP-8 emulator, written in Zig, as a direct port from my old C version.

I'm also using this as a place to try out Zig-isms.

Building

SDL2 is required for the graphics, and it can be installed via many different package managers:

$ brew install sdl2
$ sudo apt-get install libsdl2-dev
$ sudo yum install SDL2-devel

Or see the libsdl installation documentation for more options.

After that, it can be built with the Zig toolchain:

$ zig build
...

This currently builds with Zig 0.11, so it will not build with older versions.

Running

ROMs can be sourced from anywhere you like, however I recommend getting them from dmatlack/chip8. ROMs can be invoked with the path to the ROM as the argument:

$ zig-out/bin/chip8z roms/pong.ch8

Keyboard

The original CHIP-8 keypad is on the left, and what I've mapped it to on a QWERTY keyboard is on the right:

Keypad                   Keyboard
+-+-+-+-+                +-+-+-+-+
|1|2|3|C|                |1|2|3|4|
+-+-+-+-+                +-+-+-+-+
|4|5|6|D|                |Q|W|E|R|
+-+-+-+-+       =>       +-+-+-+-+
|7|8|9|E|                |A|S|D|F|
+-+-+-+-+                +-+-+-+-+
|A|0|B|F|                |Z|X|C|V|
+-+-+-+-+                +-+-+-+-+

Issues

There are various quirks, which probably won't be fixed.