CHIP-8 Emulator

This project is a CHIP-8 emulator written in Rust. CHIP-8 is a simple, interpreted programming language used in the 1970s for creating games on 8-bit microcomputers. This emulator allows you to run CHIP-8 programs and games on modern systems.

Specs

• 4 KB of RAM (512 Bytes reserved for the interpreter)
• 16 general purpose 8 bit registers labelled V0, V1 .... V9, VA, VB ..... VF.
• Special 16 bit register called I to store memory addresses
• 2 special purpose 8 bit registers for display timers and sound timers.
• 16 bit program counter to store the currently executing address
• 8 bit stack pointer to point towards the topmost element in the stack.
• Stack is an array of 16 16-bit values.

Technical reference

http://devernay.free.fr/hacks/chip8/C8TECH10.HTM#0.0

Key Mappings

The following key mappings are used to emulate the CHIP-8 keypad:

CHIP-8 Keypad:    Emulator Keypad:

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

Getting Started

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/aayush0325/chip8_emu.git
   cd chip8

2. Build the project:

   cd desktop
   cargo build --release

3. Run a CHIP-8 ROM:

   cargo run --release path/to/rom

4. Try out some sample games: The c8games directory in the repository contains a collection of CHIP-8 games you can run with the emulator. Simply specify the path to a game file in the c8games directory when running the emulator.

5. For example:

   cargo run --release ../c8games/PONG