gochip8

gochip8

An emulator of the Chip 8 interpreted language in Go.

Under MIT license.

Usage

gochip8 <flags> path/to/rom

Flags

• -disassemble instead of running the rom, print an explanation of each opcode to stdout
• -scaling 10 factor to scale from original Chip 8 resolution (64x32), defaults to 10 for a window size of 640x320
• -cycles 10 number of steps to attempt to emulate per loop

A collection of games, understood to be in the public domain are in the games directory.

Controls

The Chip 8 has a hexidecimal keyboard which is bound to these keys:

1 2 3 4

Q W E R

A S D F

Z X C V

Building

Go installation and C compiler required

1. Get SDL2

Requries SDL2 library, usually available in your systems package manager,

Ubuntu apt-get install libsdl2

Mac OSX brew install sdl2

Windows

Install the MinGW development build of SDL2, ensure you have a 64bit MinGW toolchain.

2. go-sdl2

The only Go dependency is the SDL2 bindings:

go get -v github.com/veandco/go-sdl2/sdl

3. Build & Run

go build will build an executable, to run on Windows you must have the SDL2.dll in the same path as the executable or in the system path.

Testing

The aim for testing is to have at least one unit test per instruction to verify correctness of the program. Some instructions still require a unit test.

Run go test -cover ./chip8.

Reference

Built using Reference.html found here, a copy is also included.

Wikipedia also has a good article on Chip 8.