jchip8-rs

jchip8-rs implements the CHIP-8 interpreted programming language from the 1970's. CHIP-8 provides a description of the virtual machine that it runs on, and jchip8-rs emulates this machine well enough to run many original games for the system (23 public domain games are included in /c8games). It is a port of chip8, a CHIP-8 emulator I wrote in Go about ten years ago, and has taught me a lot about the Rust language.

jchip8-rs is written in Rust and uses SDL2 to display graphics. It relies on the rust-sdl2 crate for SDLv2 support. With an SDL2 installation, jchip8-rs should be able to run on most systems that are supported by the Rust environment.

jchip8-rs was mostly written in Fall 2024 as a hobby project, but its source code should be clean enough for consumption by other humans.

After it is built, it can be run via jchip8-rs --path "path/to/chip8/rom".

Debug mode can be turned on via the --debug flag, which will enable logging.

jchip8-rs uses a hex keyboard, mapped directly to keys 0-9 and A-F. Gameplay can be paused with P, and quit with Q. (This can be changed at the top of gfx/hardware.rs.)

Happy emulating!

Screenshots

Features

jchip8-rs supports rudimentary save-states. If the --save-state "path/to/save/state" argument is passed at startup, gameplay can be saved to path/to/save/state (while not paused) by pressing S. To load a game state, start jchip8-rs with the --load-state "path/to/load/state" argument. (Both --save-state and --load-state can be passed at the same time, and are allowed to point to the same state, for easy continuation of a game.) Note that for simplicity, jchip8-rs game states include the full game being played, so --path should not be provided when starting a game from a save-state.

Acknowledgements

This project relies upon the clap (argument parsing), rand, rust-sdl2, serde, serde-json, and serde-with (save-state handling) crates. Licenses for them (and SDL2) are provided in /third-party.

License

MIT