chip8-win-console

For science!

Running

1. Build the source
2. Run the program
3. Type in a path to a CHIP-8 game (relative to the exe)
4. Press Enter to play!

(This project relies on P/Invoke to interact with the native Windows API, and thus only Windows Desktop platforms are supported at the moment)

Keyboard Input

A CHIP-8 / COSMAC-VIP keyboard is made up of 16 keys and is laid out like this:

1 2 3 C
4 5 6 D
7 8 9 E
A 0 B F

These are mapped to the following keys on a typical QWERTY keyboard:

1 2 3 4
Q W E R
A S D F
Z X C V

If you have a non-QWERTY keyboard that has the same mechanical layout, the keys should map across to your setup equally well. For example, the keys for a Russian ЙЦУКЕН keyboard should be mapped like so:

1 2 3 4
Й Ц У К
Ф Ы В А
Я Ч С М

TODOs / Up For Grabs

• Implement a less flickery method of drawing to the console
  • Collision detection is done by inverting pixels on the screen, and it's quite evident...
• Less abrupt audio cut off
  • Sound is implemented by looping a dynamically-generated WAV file until a timer hits 0
  • Stopping the sound sometimes results in a little pop noise that's caused by the waveform dropping to 0 very suddenly, instead of smoothing out
• Configurable keyboard layout
• Get rid of some magic numbers / constants
• Support exiting / changing / resetting programs