chippy

CHIP-8 emulator written in Rust. This is intended to be a project for gaining experience writing emulators and practice Rust.

Dependencies

You'll need to install the SDL2.0 Development Libraries. The README of the rust-sdl2 project has very detailed information on how to install it in different platforms and it also covers scenarios that may be relevant to you.

Usage

$ cargo run -- games/<GAME>

You should replace with whatever game tickles your fancy. The games under games/ are public domain.

Testing

$ cargo test

Keypad

The original CHIP-8 16-key hexadecimal keypad has the following layout:

+---+---+---+---+
| 1 | 2 | 3 | C |
+---+---+---+---+
| 4 | 5 | 6 | D |
+---+---+---+---+
| 7 | 8 | 9 | E |
+---+---+---+---+
| A | 0 | B | F |
+---+---+---+---+

I'm using the following mapping:

+---+---+---+---+
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
+---+---+---+---+
| Q | W | E | R |
+---+---+---+---+
| A | S | D | F |
+---+---+---+---+
| Z | X | C | V |
+---+---+---+---+

Screenshots

Space Invaders

Blinky

References

• CHIP-8 Games Pack
• Cowgod's Chip-8 Technical Reference v1.0
• Matthew Mikolay's CHIP-8 Technical Reference
• Collection of CHIP-8 related documentation
• Awesome CHIP-8

And here is a list of some of the projects that I've read and used as a source of inspiration. I didn't copy any of the code, but some names may be exactly the same simply because there was no better alternative.

• Laurence Muller's CHIP-8 emulator in C++
• Steve Losh's CHIP-8 emulator in Common Lisp
• Starr Horne's CHIP-8 emulator in Rust
• Michael Burge's NES emulator in Rust
• Imran Nazar's GameBoy emulator in JavaScript

License

See LICENSE.