8ChocChip is a Chip8 emulator. It was created to help me learn and understand how emulators work. I plan to support other Chip8 variants in the future with many other features like save states, per program configs, etc.

There are a couple of things left to do until I would say it works well enough

• Proper flag/feature compatibility unlike many out there
• Get emulator to run at a decent speed
• Windows Support
• MacOS Support
• Switch to SDL from SFML
• Save state
• Configurable keys
• Database for auto setting selector
• Other Chip8 variants
• Per program settings (Keybindings, graphics, sounds, etc)
• Discord Rich Presence support
• JIT mode
• Proper installation method

• GNU/Linux - Should work on any distro that will let you run plain executable files from the last few years at least
• Windows 7 - Make sure to install Visual Studio 2017 Needs testing since I changed some compiler stuff
• Windows 8(.1), 10, 11
• Windows 95
• Windows 98
• Windows XP
• Windows Vista
• MacOS 9
• MacOS X
• MacOS

Just launch the downloaded executable and you are good to go. Some programs/games can be found here.

For a proper test suite you can check out https://github.com/Timendus/chip8-test-suite

--speedtest - Enabled speedtest mode. Can slightly increase performance by disabling some features that stop it from running at full speed.

--rom <path to rom> - Immediately launches into the specified ROM instead of the menu.

--instructions <instruction count> - The amount of instructions to run per frame (60fps).

--debug - Enabled printing extra debug information to the console

Install dependencies

sudo apt-get install build-essential git make \
        pkg-config cmake ninja-build gnome-desktop-testing libasound2-dev libpulse-dev \
        libaudio-dev libjack-dev libsndio-dev libx11-dev libxext-dev \
        libxrandr-dev libxcursor-dev libxfixes-dev libxi-dev libxss-dev libxtst-dev \
        libxkbcommon-dev libdrm-dev libgbm-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libgles2-mesa-dev \
        libegl1-mesa-dev libdbus-1-dev libibus-1.0-dev libudev-dev \
        libpipewire-0.3-dev libwayland-dev libdecor-0-dev liburing-dev

Clone the repository through the command line, or another option you may have

git clone https://github.com/JustDoom/8ChocChip.git

Download and project dependencies

git submodule update --init --recursive

Configure CMake

mkdir -p build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

Build

cmake --build . --config Release

The generated files will be inside the build/bin directory

I don't have a Windows machine set up to test so for now just follow the workflow

Thanks to these two blogs that helped me through creating this emulator.

• Timendus Chip8 Test Suite - An incredible test suite for Chip8
• Guide to making a CHIP-8 emulator - This one is a great resource on creating a proper emulator
• Emulator Development Discord - A really nice discord about emulator development

• SDL - UI, graphics, input and sounds
• SDL-ttf - Text fonts
• SDL-image - Images
• nlohmann/json - Library to manage save data (like directories that hold ROMs) and possible future config files
• nicbarker/clay - UI layout library