YAC8E - Yet Another CHIP-8 Emulator

YAC8E is Yet Another CHIP-8 Emulator written in Rust.

This emulator implements the original CHIP-8 specification and its 35 instructions (no SUPER-CHIP).

I tried to make the code as clean as possible, and added some documentation. This project aims to be a good reference for people wanting to implement their own CHIP-8 emulator in Rust.

I invite anyone who wants to start working with emulators to start by creating a CHIP-8 emulator. The creation process is really fun, progressive and not boring at any moment.

Usage

Because i felt like so, i decided to use 2 different libraries in order to handle the display, the keyboard and the sound :

• SDL
• minifb (doesn't support sound unfortunately)

You can pick the library of your choice when starting the emulator.

You can also set a custom Hertz value for the CPU clock cycle per second speed. The best Hertz value may vary with games and may require some tuning. 500 Hz is considered a good value in average.

USAGE:
    yac8e [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] <ROM_FILE>

FLAGS:
    -d, --debug      Enables debugging output
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
        --height <HEIGHT>      Sets the window height [default: 320]
    -H, --hertz <HERTZ>        Sets the Hertz value for the CPU clock cycle per second speed [default: 500]
    -l, --library <LIBRARY>    Sets the handling library to use (minifb doesn't support sounds) [default: sdl]
                               [possible values: sdl, minifb]
        --width <WIDTH>        Sets the window width [default: 640]

ARGS:
    <ROM_FILE>    The ROM file to run

Building

In order to build this project, you will need to have sdl2 installed.

For Debian-based distributions :

sudo apt-get install libsdl2-dev libsdl2-gfx-dev

For Arch-based distributions :

sudo pacman -S sdl2 sdl2_gfx

To build this project, you will need to use cargo:

cargo build --release

Your binaries will be available in the target/release directory.

This emulator has only been tested on Linux 64-bit, but it should work on most platforms.

Resources

These are some good resources i found for the creation of this emulator :

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8
• http://mattmik.com/files/chip8/mastering/chip8.html
• http://devernay.free.fr/hacks/chip8/C8TECH10.HTM

I also peeked at a few already existing projects to help me on a few things (project structure, ...), check them out too :

• https://github.com/starrhorne/chip8-rust
• https://github.com/AlexEne/rust-chip8

Known bugs

Feel free to report any bugs, so i can fix them.

I noticed the sound sometimes gets skipped on games like PONG. I didn't find where the issue was coming from, and i noticed this bug and a few other emulators as well. The bug may come from the ROM itself.

Contributing

Feel free to contribute. You can make a pull request to suggest any change you'd like to make (for example a code optimization, ...).

License

YAC8E is licensed under the GNU AGPLv3 license. Refer to LICENSE for more informations.