rusty_chip

Yet another CHIP-8 emulator.

What

A binary for CHIP-8 emulation. Has:

• Graphics and sound(beep).
• Friendly UI
• Debugging capabilities
  • inspect program counter, stack, RAM, etc.
  • Pause and step instruction by instruction
  • Reset to initial state.
• Two modes of operation - Play only or Debug.
• Configurations:
  • Choose between CHIP-8 or Super-CHIP instruction behaviour.
  • Set the CPU clock from 1 to 2000 Hz.
  • Square or circular pixels
  • Grid over square pixels
  • Two ways to reduce flickering - either remove it or fade erased pixels.

How

Written in rust using the bevy game engine which is a massive overkill for such project.

Why

To get my hands dirty with rust and bevy.

Usage

If you don't have rust get the latest version from here https://www.rust-lang.org/

In order to use the emulator just for playing simply:

cargo run --release

If you also want to use it for debuggin you can call it like this:

cargo run debug --release

NOTE for MacOS users:

Bevy uses the wgpu crate as a rendering backend and the current default backend API is Vulkan. This would most probably not work for you so you can change the WGPU_BACKEND environment variable to "metal" located inside .cargo/config.toml.

TODO

Possible improvements would be:

• Better visuals
  • Reduced flickering - non at all or fading effect
  • Configurable pixel size, color and shape
• Editable register, PC, RAM, etc. values
• Integrated text editor for editing and testing chip-8 programs

Dependancies

• bevy 0.9 - The overkill game engine.
• bevy_egui - Bevy egui integration. Immidiate mode GUI in the likes of ImGui.
• bevy_pixel_buffer - Pixel framebuffer with egui and rayon integration.
• rfd - File dialogs library.

Thanks

• The guide that started me on this emulator. Thanks, Tobias.
• Chip-8 test suite whitout which I wouldn't have caught a couple of nasty bugs.
• A great collection of roms for testing and playing around.