le36 / chip36

CHIP-8 emulator made with Java. Supports CHIP-8, S-CHIP and XO-CHIP.

CHIP-36

Cross-platform CHIP-8 Emulator made with Java

Chip-8 interpreter and debugger. Currently runs everything made for CHIP-8, S-CHIP or XO-CHIP instruction set. Lots of different features, great tool for learning CHIP-8 or making ROMs for it.

There are two different modes for the emulator. With the extended mode you have all the registers visible to you all the time. With the normal mode you can focus on running the ROM without all the noise, showing you only the ROM.

Quite cool feature is the fact that this emulator tries to remove some typical stutter and flicker CHIP-8 has by fading pixels rather than turning them straight off. The effect works great but has to be adjusted for each rom to get the best possible result. It can also be used to create cool trailing effects for sprites. Effect works even in XO-CHIP 4 color ROMs, but often in these ROMs it's not required and may affect performance.

There is a lot of customization available. Glow and blur effects for the game, all the colors are adjustable as well. With quirks, you can get any ROM running on this emulator, legacy CHIP-8 or modern XO-CHIP ROM, everything will work. Keyboard is rebindable, so you can truly make them ROMs feel good no matter which platform you are running this emulator.

ROMs can be played from terminal and combined for example with cool-retro-term you can play ROMs like it's 1970. With XO-CHIP ROMs only the default plane will be printed to terminal.

Loaded ROM can be disassembled during runtime. It is possible to follow program counter, or view the emulators RAM by hand. It's possible to see sprites easily with the graphical view feature.

There is separate sprite viewer that shows how the sprites are drawn. Sprites can also be extracted from the ROM. Sprite data can then be easily copied and used in Octo assembler.

How to run

Requires Java 11 or newer to run.

Start

Clone project and use this command when in root folder to launch the program

Linux mvn compile exec:java -Dexec.mainClass=com.chip8.Main

Windows mvn compile exec:java -D"exec.mainClass"="com.chip8.Main"

or you can build with

mvn package

or get the prebuilt .jar file from releases.

Testing

Execute all tests

mvn test

Jacoco code coverage report

mvn test jacoco:report

Checkstyle report

mvn jxr:jxr checkstyle:checkstyle

Generate JavaDoc with

mvn javadoc:javadoc

chip36's Issues

help to make games

Hi

I'm starting to make my own chip-8 emulator in C#.
It will be only very basic so not like your project.

I wanted to try to write my own games but I haveno idea where to even start!
Your emulator seems to be a great working place to make roms.

Is it possible to get in contact with you for questions? I think nobody made a chip-8 emulator that has so cool features!
Did you ever made your own games using chip-8?

Thanks in advance!
Jessica