This crate contains tools to enable working with CHIP-8 virtual machine instructions and a CHIP-8 virtual machine simulator. It is intended to be used as the core of CHIP-8 emulators, CHIP-8 assemblers, CHIP-8 disassmblers, and other programs that need to deal with CHIP-8 instructions.
Instruction definitions for the original CHIP-8 instruction set and several instruction set extensions are provided. Decoding and encoding functions are provided to enable converting from binary codewords to an abstract instruction representation and vice versa.
A CHIP-8 virtual machine simulator system is provided to allow the creation of CHIP-8 emulators or other tools that need to execute CHIP-8 instructions. The simulator provides a thread-safe mechanism for simulator control and access to system state.
A flexible configuration system allows customization of the CHIP-8 virtual machine, including available instructions, hardware configuration, and execution quirks of the CHIP-8 virtual machine. Several preset configurations corresponding to historical CHIP-8 machines, such as the COSMAC VIP, are provided.
A Config is used to store the configuration of a specific CHIP-8 system. A Config is
used when instantiating machine state or an instruction set.
A set of Operations are supported by this library. These operations correspond
with instructions from the CHIP-8 instruction set, but are typically more flexible to allow
re-use.
A Pattern defines how the operands required by an Operation will be defined by the
codeword.
An instruction::Definition is a combination of an Operation and a Pattern.
These Definitions can be combined into an instruction::Set that is able to
decode codewords into Operations and encode Operations into codewords.
The state of a CHIP-8 system, including CPU and peripherals, is represented by a Chip8.
It is able to execute instructions by providing an implementation of the Execute trait.
A Simulator contains a Chip8 and an instruction::Set, which allows it to simulate
a CHIP-8 machine fetching codewords from memory, decoding the codewords, and executing the
resulting instructions. The Simulator provides a mechanism for thread-safe control
of the machine and access to state information.