8ChocChip is an emulator for the Chip8 software that I am working on to learn the basics around emulation. I decided to program this in C++ because I wanted to do more in it and improve my skills.
The graphics and only library used in this is SFML which handles the window, inputs and sounds. libconfig is used to manage config and save data files, and NativeFileDialog is used for basic popup windows like the file/directory selector.
There are a couple of things left to do until I would say it works well enough
- Fix some of the instructions that result in most programs failing except for
BLINKY - Cleaner/more optimised code
-
Windows SupportNeeds fixing again, GitHub actions just don't like it at the moment, compilable on a local machine though. - MacOS Support
- Easily support multiple graphics frameworks for different platform support if the primary one doesn't support them (Desktop, Mobile, Game Consoles etc)
To run 8ChocChip you can either launch the executable file with the command line and specify a rom to instantly launch into like this /path/to/exectable/8ChocChip --rom /path/to/rom.8ch.
Or you can normally launch the executable to open the UI and manage it from there.
Some basic ROMS can be found here.
Until a proper building section is created, just follow the commands that are used in the GitHub actions workflow for your platform.
https://github.com/JustDoom/8ChocChip/blob/master/.github/workflows/build.yml
Follow the commands but not everything is required to be executed exactly as the file does. Some parts are just setting up ssh or installing dependencies which you may have installed already or have different methods to accomplish the task.
To build this it requires C++, CMake and whatever SFML and SFML Audio requires on your platform. Check build file above.
Thanks to these two blogs that helped me through creating this emulator How to Create Your Very Own Chip-8 Emulator Guide to making a CHIP-8 emulator
Currently, three libraries are being used
- SFML - UI, graphics, input and sounds
- NativeFileDialog - A fork of this is used for the CMakeLists files (https://github.com/AlvaroBarua/nativefiledialog/tree/CMakeLists)
- libconfig - Library to manage save data (like directories that hold ROMs) and possible future config files