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Simple chip8 interpreter and debugger written in C++

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Chip8 Interpreter

I developed this project as a learning exercise for developing something more interesting (like a GB emulator). I keep referring to this as an emulator, although I'm aware this is just an interpreter.

There are a number of online resources that I used for learning how Chip8 works:

There's a bit of controversy and discussion about how certain instructions work, but I decided to stick to the same decisions as Austin Morlan's work.

I have no experience with GUIs, and I decided to use mahi-gui (https://github.com/mahilab/mahi-gui) , which is wrapper of some other popular libraries such as ImGui. The other external dependency I used is spdlog (https://github.com/gabime/spdlog). There are some utilities that I could have written as separate side projects (such as RingBuffer, StopWatch and Rng), but they're so small (and potentially not that useful) that it's probably better to keep them here.

I spent way too long on this project, but I wanted to satisfy the following requirements as good practise:

  • Dependency Injection
    • The Cpu depends on RAM, Display and Keypad, but I didn't want to hardcode this choice in the Cpu itself. That's why instead of having the instructions methods that just accepts the opcode, I often pass additional interface parameters
  • gcc-11 and clang-13 compile clean
  • all gcc and clang sanitizers run clean
    • corollary: no undefined behaviour
      • this requires a bit more verbosity, as, for instance, the wrap-around of std::uint8_t has to be done via an explicit cast
      • clang-ubsan complains about the standard library implementation. I managed to silent that for the Rng, but not for bitset
      • I could equivalently have had some test roms run at compile-time, having all constexpr functions, like Jason Turner does, and it would have been cool, but that's for another time
  • 100% code coverage
    • Everything needs to be unit tested
    • I didn't manage to run clang-coverage in a fully automated way. This gives more info than gcov's, but the html report produced with gcovr is enough
    • For some reason codecov doesn't play too well with reports generated from gcovr. I've tried to exclude throw and unreachable branches, which improved from 58% to 75%, but I'm still missing 25% on log lines and some lambdas.

A design choice that I'm not fully satisfied with is the fact that the Chip8 interpreter object is templated. I could have injected dependencies at creation alternatively, but I decided to use templates as it was quicker to write unit tests for.

The rewind feature doesn't really work, as it just retreat the program counter, whilst I should restore the previous state of the emulator (and keep an history, really). Maybe I'll do that in the future, it's not too hard!

A screenshot is for your reference here: ScreenShot

I spent just the necessary time for having this GUI to visualize the emulator display and some other tools for helping debugging issues. I'm not an expert with ImGui and I wanted to spend more time on the coding/quality parts rather than having a super cool GUI.

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Simple chip8 interpreter and debugger written in C++

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