CHIP-8 Emulator

A CHIP-8 interpreter/emulator written in Rust as a hobby/study project. This implementation follows the official CHIP-8 technical reference

About CHIP-8

CHIP-8 is an interpreted programming language developed in the mid-1970s for early microcomputers. This emulator interprets and executes CHIP-8 programs (ROMs). You can find some games here

Emulator Specifications

• Display: 64x32 monochrome pixels
• Memory: 4KB RAM
• Registers: 16 general-purpose 8-bit registers (V0-VF)
• Special Registers:
  • I: 16-bit index register
  • PC: Program counter
  • SP: Stack pointer
• Stack: 16 levels for subroutine calls
• Input: 16-key hexadecimal keypad
• Font: Built-in 4x5 pixel hexadecimal font sprites (0-F)

Simple Desktop frontend was implemented with sdl2 library

Startig

• You need an audio file: desktop/sounds/sound.mp3 (for beep sound)

cd desktop
cargo run <path-to-rom-file>

Example:

cargo run ../games/PONG

ToDo

Potential enhancements:

• Improved frontend (maybe browser based)
• Enhanced CLI (ability to choose different parameters)