About
Chipper is a Chip-8 emulator written in Rust. It emulates all of the instructions, including some ambiguous ones. There are various sources that document the Chip-8 specifications and the instructions. Some resources that I found useful:
* [Cowgod's Chip-8 Technical Reference](http://devernay.free.fr/hacks/chip8/C8TECH10.HTM)
* [Chip-8 Tutorial](https://www.chip-8.com/tutorial)
* [Massung's info on Chip-8](https://github.com/massung/chip-8)
The emulator is a port of the original C++ emulator I wrote previously, with some noteable differences:
- It uses egui for the GUI instead of Dear Imgui as in the C++ version.
- I didn't bother implementing sound in this version because it's a real pain for what is essentially a very boring beeper.
- It tries to maintain 60FPS in a lazy manner by calculating how much time it took to render one frame, and sleeping a bit if it's under 16ms (which is roughly but not quite 60Hz). The original C++ version actually syncs framerate to the sound which plays at 60Hz and is a lot more timing accurate.
- In order to get Egui to work with SDL2/OpenGL, I had to write an Egui backend first. It's overkill for a project of this scope, but it might be useful for someone looking to do something similar with Egui and SDL2.
Building and running the emulator
Provided you have the Rust toolchain set up on your platform, this is as simple as downloading or cloning the repository and doing a:
cargo run --release
I do provide a windows binary in the "Release" section for lucky Windows users who don't wish to compile and run from the source code.