CarlosEduardoL / R8

Yet Another CHIP-8 Interpreter in Rust 😉

R8: Yet Another CHIP-8 Interpreter in Rust 😉

R8 is a CHIP-8 emulator written in Rust.

It has two modes of operation

• using sdl2 and egui. With an small GUI for debugging, control the emulator speed and step cycle by cicle, loading roms and assembling source code.
• using crossterm to make a simple TUI.

Dependencies

On windows:

• rustup

On Linux:

• rustup
• sdl2 (only for sdl2-gui)
• libgtk3 (only for sdl2-gui)

How to run it

Install Rust

Follow the instructions on the Rust website.

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/CarlosEduardoL/R8

Run the interpreter sdl2-gui

cd R8
cargo run --release --features "sdl2-gui" --bin r8-sdl2

Run the interpreter with tui gui

cd R8
cargo run --release --features "tui-gui" --bin r8-tui

What is CHIP-8?

CHIP-8 is an interpreted programming language that was used to create games for some home computers in the 1970s and 1980s. It has a simple instruction set and graphics system, and it can run on various platforms with minimal changes.

Current state

• All opcodes are implemented
• The display works
• The keyboard works
• The timers work
• The sound works
• The debugger works
• The GUI works
• The roms drag and drop works
• Use default system file explorer to load roms
• The assembler works
• You can load a plain text assembler file and run it
• You can use a slider to change the speed of the emulator
• TUI works

Possible improvements

• Add a Wasm version
• Add a disassembler
• Add the posibility to save/load state

References

I used the following sources to learn about CHIP-8 and implement the emulator:

• Wikipedia article on CHIP-8
• CHIP-8 Technical Reference
• Mastering CHIP-8

ROMS source

• Public Domain Roms