Chip 8 emulator
Trip8 demo ROM running on my emulator.
This is a fully featured emulator for the Chip 8 system.
Chip-8 originated as virtual machines for old microcomputers in the mid 70s to help games be better programmed for them.
As such, unlike other emulators, there is no original hardware system, meaning we don’t have to focus as much on cycle accurate hardware changes, and more on good fundamentals.
Developed in early November, this emulator correctly implements all instructions and supports variable execution and timer speeds.
When coding this project, I took care to research some of the best practices when it comes to programming emulators.
Some posts about various aspects of this can be found on my blog.
Personal thoughts Link to heading
Programming an emulator gave me a lot of experience with dealing with coding programs that are sensitive to timings.
Great care must be taken to ensure that the extra overhead inherent with the software decoding + execution of instructions doesn’t bog down the programs being run on the emulator, which oftentimes may rely on specific timings to function correctly.
I used slightly more advanced techniques than may be typical in basic Chip-8 emulators written by others,
these include the use of function pointers to help decode instructions and the bitset class from the c++ standard library to represent registers and memory.
I felt that doing this would give me more experience, and help me to write better emulators for more complex systems in the future.
Overall this project was pretty fun and educational.