rCHIP8, a CHIP-8 emulator

rCHIP8 is a CHIP-8 emulator written in Rust and SDL2. A writeup about this implementation can be found in my blog.

Results of running this ROM:

The cavern game:

Find additional games and demos in the CHIP-8 Archive or in this repository

Building

To compile for release, just do:

cargo build --release

Running

You can go ahead and run the executable created in the building step, which is under target/release/rchip8:

target/release/rchip8 [ROM_FILE]

Or you can just run it with cargo, with the --release target enabled:

cargo run --release -- [ROM_FILE]

Display scaling

This implementation supports an integer display scale factor to make the display larger. Use it with -s [FACTOR].

Colors

You can specify the foreground color as a hex string with -c or --fgcol.

You can specify the background color as a hex string with -b or --bgcol.

For example:

rchip -c ABABAB -b 030303

Debug

Enable debug mode with -d. In this mode, the program halts before every instruction and prints the instruction itself, the decoded operation, the value of each register and the value of the index I.

Speed

You can change the emulation speed in instructions per second with -i [IPS]. The default value is 1000.

CLI arguments

Here are the available arguments:

R-CHIP-8 0.1.0
Toni Sagrsità Sellés <[email protected]>
CHIP-8 emulator

USAGE:
    rchip8 [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] <input>

FLAGS:
    -d, --debug      Run in debug mode. Pauses after each instruction, prints info to stdout.
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -b, --bgcol <bgcol>    Background (off) color as a hex code, defaults to 101020
    -c, --fgcol <fgcol>    Foreground (on) color as a hex code, defaults to ABAECB
    -i, --ips <ips>        Emulation speed in instructions per second, defaults to 1000
    -s, --scale <scale>    Integer display scaling, defaults to 10 (for 640x320 upscaled resolution)

ARGS:
    <input>    ROM file to load and run.