chipBoy8

A CHIP-8 interpreter written in C++ using SDL2.

Even though there are still some bugs left, the code is pretty much functional already by making a good number of games playable. The code has only been tested on Windows and ArchLinux, but Mac OS X should be supported, as well as the different *BSD flavours.

Usage

As of now, you can execute a CHIP-8 program by:

• Dragging and dropping the CHIP-8 binary over the interpreter executable
• Executing the interpreter in the command line with the CHIP-8 program path as its first argument

Dependencies and building instructions

In order to build chipBoy8, SDL2 and CMake are needed. SDL2's development libraries for compilation and its runtime libraries for execution of the binary.

This project uses CMake to ensure portability across different platforms and/or compilers.

NOTE FOR WINDOWS: As Windows lacks default include or lib folders, the development libraries must be extracted somewhere else. It doesn't really matter, but an environment variable named SDL2 must be created showing their path (e.g: $(SDL2)=C:\SDL), so that CMake knows where to look for them.

1. cd <repository root>
2. mkdir build
3. cd build
4. cmake ..

The build directory should be populated now with whatever files your compiler needs. In case of Visual Studio on Windows those are .sln and .vcxproj files (among others). CMake can be instructed to populate build with files for other compilers (Projects for XCode or Makefiles, for instance), as explained in the documentation of CMake

The project must be compiled now. In Visual Studio that is pressing F5 in the IDE, while for *NIX systems most likely ./configure && make is the way to go.

TODO

• Fix bugs (known and unknown)
• Check if timing is consistent across different machines
• Make use of SDL's sound API to emulate the buzzer
• Remake the gigantic opcode-decoding switch as function pointer arrays
• Introduce wxWidgets in order to load games easily