A CHIP-8 emulator written in C++ and providing graphics with SDL2 library.
Missile
Bricks
Tic-Tac-Toe
From Cowgod's CHIP-8 Technical Reference v1.0 :
Chip-8 is a simple, interpreted, programming language which was first used on some do-it-yourself computer systems in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The COSMAC VIP, DREAM 6800, and ETI 660 computers are a few examples. These computers typically were designed to use a television as a display, had between 1 and 4K of RAM, and used a 16-key hexadecimal keypad for input. The interpreter took up only 512 bytes of memory, and programs, which were entered into the computer in hexadecimal, were even smaller.
In the early 1990s, the Chip-8 language was revived by a man named Andreas Gustafsson. He created a Chip-8 interpreter for the HP48 graphing calculator, called Chip-48. The HP48 was lacking a way to easily make fast games at the time, and Chip-8 was the answer.
Clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/prasunka/CHIP8-Emulator
Note: Building requires CMake and SDL2
On Debian based systems, you can use:
apt-get install cmake libsdl2-dev
to install them.
After installing dependencies, build using:
cd CHIP8-Emulator
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
./emulator <ROM file path>
See roms directory for some public domain programs.
The original 16-key keypad layout looked like this:
| 1 | 2 | 3 | C |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | 5 | 6 | D |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | E |
| A | 0 | B | F |
To make it more usable on modern keyboards, it has been mapped to the following layout:
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q | W | E | R |
| A | S | D | F |
| Z | X | C | V |
See the README in roms directory for tested controls.
- Add sound support.
- Render FPS value directly to the window.
This project is available under the MIT License.
Cowgod's CHIP-8 Technical Reference v1.0 (Recommended)
HowToEmulation - CHIP8 (Recommended)
CHIP-8 ported to Rust (For non-spoiler code reference)
How to write an emulator (CHIP-8 interpreter) (Refer if stuck in program structure)