CHIP-8 Emulator

This is a simple CHIP-8 emulator written in Rust. I built it following the spec at Cowgod's CHIP-8 Technical Reference.

It implements the CHIP-8 instruction set (opcodes), and follows other specs, including:

• 4KB of memory (heap)
• 16 general-purpose 8-bit registers
• 16-entry stack
• 64x32 pixel display
• 16-key hexadecimal keypad

It uses the minifb library for the display and keyboard input handling. The only thing not implemented is the sound.

Transparently, it's pretty untested and probably has a lot of bugs, but it mostly works for the programs I've tested it with. This project was meant to be a fun way to learn Rust and CPUs/VMs, so I wasn't very "perfectionist" about this.

Usage

cargo run <path_to_rom>

Keyboard Mapping

CHIP-8 Key   Keyboard
---------    ---------
1 2 3 C      1 2 3 4
4 5 6 D      Q W E R
7 8 9 E      A S D F
A 0 B F      Z X C V

Notes

• The calculator.ch8 program is a simple example of a CHIP-8 program that adds two numbers together, (but the custom + and = sprites are not rendering for some reason).
• The coffee.ch8 program is a simple example of a CHIP-8 program that displays the word "COFFEE".

Also huge shoutout to the Rust In Action book for the baseline knowledge of Rust and CPUs to finish this project.

Contributing

If you spot any issues, or want to generally roast my code, feel free to open an issue or PR, or shout me out on X!

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.