My first little emulator of a Chip-8

So I first decided to code this Chip-8 emulator around a week ago as I've really wanted to get into emulation and as far as I was aware - writing one is the best way to learn about it. And I can definitely agree. I learnt a lot when going through this and searching the net for info, how to do certain things, using libraries etc and it has all been a great experience. The plan was that this would introduce me to the basics of emulation so I can progress to coding a Gameboy DMG-01 emulator... eventually.

I started where most people probably would: how to code a chip 8 emulator search in Google. I found the multigesture post linked at the bottom and I got going. I modelled the CPU, added the emulators basic functions and it was all good. I then tweaked around with some of the modelling for example using the header so I could model the registers as uint8_t rather than unsigned char. These little things just made it a bit easier to understand and keep track of everything. After that I went on to begin decoding the opcodes using the Cowgod's technical reference linked down below (as best as I could) and then took a look at a couple of the other emulators down below as reference on some of the instructions I was unsure about. When I finished writing them for the first time and had fixed the small syntax errors etc. I ran the program and it was fine! I couldn't believe that it actually worked (wasn't what I was expecting but then again there are only 36 instructions). I went on to looking at how I was going to draw the graphics. From what I had looked up I was either going to use SDL2 or GLUT. After playing round with both I decided to go with GLUT - primarily because it ships with OSX but also because it just seemed a bit easier to setup and initialise. To draw the graphics on screen was fairly simple as the Chip-8 has monochrome graphics and a 64 x 32 pixel display. Just iterate through my screen array and draw the pixels. On first run the picture was a mess. So I spent around an hour going back through my opcodes optimising some and correcting others and now that is all done so here we have the Chip-Emul8.

The only thing I have planned for now is to implement sounds, that's it.

Currently I've only tested this on Mac and I believe you have to download GLUT on other OSs. First off, download the repo and open it up. Navigate to the directory and run

After that, to use the emulator type

Controls... I'm not exactly sure as to the controls for all the games but the keys will be one of: 1, 2, 3, 4, q, w, e, r, t, y, a, s, d, f, z, x, c, v. To quit the emulator press esc.

To be done..

Exact same as Mac.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8#Virtual_machine_description

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

http://www.multigesture.net/articles/how-to-write-an-emulator-chip-8-interpreter/

http://mattmik.com/files/chip8/mastering/chip8.html

http://emulator101.com/

http://fms.komkon.org/EMUL8/HOWTO.html

http://www.zophar.net/

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/programming-9/c-howto-read-binary-file-into-buffer-172985/

https://github.com/eshyong/Chip-8-Emulator

https://github.com/bryangarza/chip8

https://github.com/prophittcorey/iC8