CHIP8

Chip8 emulator written in C++ with SDL2 graphics library.

I made this project because I am interested in hardware emulation and I wanted to see how hard is it to make na emulator (even easy one like this).

Instalation

Chip8 emulator can be installed simply by copying the following files anywhere you want.

• Chip8emu.exe
• Chip8lib.dll
• SDL2.dll
• SDL2_mixer.dll
• beepsfx.wav

You can download binaries from here: http://chip8.stibrany.com/Chip8emulator.zip

Controls

Original emulator had 16 keys which are mapped as follows:

 CHIP8        KEYBOARD
1 2 3 C	      7 8 9 W  
4 5 6 D   =>  4 5 6 Q  
7 8 9 E       1 2 3 E  
A 0 B F       A 0 S F  

Every game may use different keys for control, but for example here is how to play the INVADERS:

Move Left = 4
Move Right = 6
Shoot = 5

Game ROMs

However games nor programs are not included in this project, you can find some on the internet.
One such website is this: http://www.zophar.net/pdroms/chip8/chip-8-games-pack.html

Building from source

NOTE: Currently Chip8 emulator is compatible with Windows OS only.

Prerequisites

To build the emulator, you need, apart from the source code, a open-source library called SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) of version 2.

C/C++ IDE (Visual Studio)

This project has been developed using Visual Studio Community 2015 which is a free version of Visual Studio. For the most convenient way to build the emulator I recommend using Visual Studio.

SDL2 library

1. Go to https://www.libsdl.org/download-2.0.php
2. Download Development Libraries
3. Extract the ZIP somewhere. (My path is C:\Development\Dependencies)

Emulator Source Code

If you haven't done so already, now we need to get the source code of the emulator.
Either:

1. Download the ZIP archive
   Or:
2. Open up git in console
3. And type git clone https://github.com/tstibro/chip8.git

Visual Studio solution configuration

Before we can build the solution, we need to setup Visual Studio so it knows
where our SDL2 library and it's source code is stored.

1. Open Chip8emu.sln in Visual Studio
2. Right-click on Chip8emu project
3. Properties
4. Select All Configurations in Configuration dropdown
5. Go to Configuration Properties -> VC++ Directories
6. Click on edit next to Include Directories
7. And enter paths to SDL2 and SDL2mixer includes My are:
   C:\Development\Dependencies\SDL2_mixer-2.0.1\include
   C:\Development\Dependencies\SDL2-2.0.4\include
8. Click on edit next to Library Directories
9. And enter paths to SDL2 and SDL2mixer libraries
   My are:
   C:\Development\Dependencies\SDL2_mixer-2.0.1\lib\x86
   C:\Development\Dependencies\SDL2-2.0.4\lib\x86
10. Go to C/C++ -> General
11. Click on edit next to Additional Include Directories
12. And enter paths to SDL2 and SDL2mixer includes
    My are:
    C:\Development\Dependencies\SDL2_mixer-2.0.1\include
    C:\Development\Dependencies\SDL2-2.0.4\include
13. Go To Linker -> Input
14. Click on edit next to Additional Dependencies
15. And add each on separate line like this:
    SDL2.lib
    SDL2main.lib
    SDL2_mixer.lib
16. Done. Build the solution.

Attributions

Beep Sound: https://www.freesound.org/people/unfa/sounds/215416
tiny file dialogs: Guillaume Vareille, http://tinyfiledialogs.sourceforge.net