CHIP-8 is an interpreted programming language, developed by Joseph Weisbecker made on his 1802 Microprocessor. It was initially used on the COSMAC VIP and Telmac 1800 8-bit microcomputers in the mid-1970s. - Wikipedia
It is able to supports multiple graphical APIs and multiple interpreter implementations. We consider an instruction ~= 1 cycle, so 500hz means it executes 500 instructions per second.
- Install the dependencies
cargoSDL2(as library)
- Compile and install it
cargo install --path .
- Run
tinychip --help
If you want to help the project, you can follow the guidelines in CONTRIBUTING.md.
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| A | Z | E | R |
| Q | S | D | F |
| W | X | C | V |
Some descriptions of the chip8 instructions differ depending on the machine. For example, the instructions 8xy6 and 8xye do not do the same thing according to the documents.
In general throughout the documents there are two kinds of semantic for the load operations (fx55, fx65) and for the shift operations (8xy6, 8xye).
To use the original semantic, use the following flags:
- Load :
--original-load=true - Shift :
--original-shift=true
| Opcode | Default | Original |
|---|---|---|
| 8xy6 | Vx = Vx >> 1, Vf = carry | Vx = Vy >> 1, Vf = carry |
| 8xye | Vx = Vx << 1, Vf = carry | Vx = Vy << 1, Vf = carry |
| fx55 | I = I + x + 1 | ❌ |
| fx65 | I = I + x + 1 | ❌ |
Some games where we know the best compatibility settings, Github issue.
docker buildx build . -t tinychipIn the example below, we have:
X11as graphic serverPulseAudioas sound server
docker run -it --rm \
-e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY \
-v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
-v /dev/dri:/dev/dri \
-v /dev/snd:/dev/snd \
-v $PWD/roms:/roms \
-v /run/user/$(id -u)/pulse/native:/run/user/$(id -u)/pulse/native \
-e PULSE_SERVER=unix:/run/user/$(id -u)/pulse/native \
-u $(id -u):$(id -u) \
tinychip /roms/brick.ch8Run cargo doc --open to read the documentation in the browser.