Chip8 Emulator

This repository is a toy project so don't expect everything to work.

It aims to be a working interpreter and a dynamic recompiler for Chip8 in C.

Goals

We're in 2020, no one needs a chip8 emulator, and besides, dozens are already available on the internet for all kinds of platforms.

This project's goal is to learn modern C/C++ tooling (build, delivery, dependency management, testing, ...).

As a warning, my last time using C for anything was C99 in school a decade ago. The stack we used back then was Emacs, hand-crafted Makefiles, GCC and GDB, all in command line on FreeBSD computers. There was no dependency management, no unit testing and so on...

Be indulgent!

Milestones

Some milestones for this project.

• Basic build system with CMake
• Unit testing
• Interpreter
• Graphics
• Inputs
• Quality: Linter?
• Recompiler by hand (some instructions)
• Scale2x
• Menus (to do what... load roms? set quirks? enable debugger?)
• Write NodeJS native library
• Write CPython native library
• Hardware rendering
• Shader to look like old TV
• Cross-compilation: Make this work at least in windows / linux
• Delivery: Distro packages, flatpak, windows installers...
• Dependency management: Vcpkg? Nuget? Conan? How to use/bundle recent versions of dependencies? npm's package.json equivalent?
• CI/CD: What are the industry standart CI/CD systems for C/C++?
• Recompiler using asmjit?
• Recompiler using LLVM?

Doc

Build & Run

# In the project folder
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
./emulator "your_rom.ch8"

Resources

This section contains resources I'm using.

About Chip8 itself

http://emulator101.com/

http://devernay.free.fr/hacks/chip8/C8TECH10.HTM

http://mattmik.com/files/chip8/mastering/chip8.html

About Emulation

x64 instruction encoding

http://www.c-jump.com/CIS77/CPU/x86/lecture.html#X77_0010_real_encoding

http://ref.x86asm.net/coder64.html#modrm_byte_32_64

https://defuse.ca/online-x86-assembler.htm#disassembly

https://wiki.osdev.org/X86-64_Instruction_Encoding#ModR.2FM_and_SIB_bytes

x86 adressing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t44pm0GzKvk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOnzjEd_dLg

JIT

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2013/11/05/how-to-jit-an-introduction

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2017/adventures-in-jit-compilation-part-1-an-interpreter/

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2017/adventures-in-jit-compilation-part-2-an-x64-jit/

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2017/adventures-in-jit-compilation-part-3-llvm/

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2017/adventures-in-jit-compilation-part-4-in-python/

http://www.multigesture.net/wp-content/uploads/mirror/zenogais/Dynamic%20Recompiler.html

About Dependencies

SDL

https://benedicthenshaw.com/soft_render_sdl2.html

About Tooling

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2020/c/

CMake

https://cmake.org/documentation/

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLK6MXr8gasrGmIiSuVQXpfFuE1uPT615s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7ndUhdQuU8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9kSr5enrSk

https://cliutils.gitlab.io/modern-cmake/

https://cgold.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Cmocka

https://api.cmocka.org/group__cmocka__exec.html#ga7c62fd0acf2235ce98268c28ee262a57

Nuget

https://www.nuget.org/packages/sdl2/