Chip8 Interpreter, Assembler & Disassembler

This is a personal project. Made it to learn about interpreters & CPUs.
It only tested on Ubuntu, but it will most likely run on any Debian-based ditribution.

Dependencies

You'll need SDL2 and ncurses to run this program. You can install it with :

sudo apt-get install libsdl2-dev
sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev

This program was only tested with these libraries version so it runs with any other please let me know!
You'll also need to create the folder ./obj that will be used during compilation.
Once you're all set, you can just run make in the root directory.

How to use it

Once you've installed dependencies, you can run make it'll generate c8interpreter.

At least, you have to provide a filename to run it.

There are several different options :

Flag	Descripton
-d <filename>	It will disassemble the file you're giving it. It'll be stored in disass.asm
-c	Allows you to set the number of instruction per second. Default is 100.
--font <base_10_addr>	Allows you to specify fonts start address. Default is 0x50.
--no-monitor	Disable monitoring with ncurses.
--tests	Run tests. It won't do anything else even if a file is provided. Currently there are no tests, still need do it.

Keys

Keys are mapped the same way. It was tested on an azerty keyboard.
You can press space from the monitoring terminal or the SDL2 window to halt execution.

Monitoring interpreter

You can see the state of registers, RAM around current program counter and keyboard state at any time if you havn't set --no-monitor option.

If you press any key, it'll be highlighted.

Assembler

If you want to take a look at the assembler, go here, there are some examples.

Screenshots

TODO

• Fix some opcodes interpreter
• Improve disass with labels ?
• Some examples with jumps etc
• Supervisor with ncurses to dump RAM, VRAM-like & registers ?

References

Here are listed all of the websites/emulators I used during development.

1. http://devernay.free.fr/hacks/chip8/C8TECH10.HTM - For everything available on it.
2. https://code.austinmorlan.com/austin/chip8-emulator - Mainly for graphics & used it to check my opcodes implementations.
3. https://github.com/mwales/chip8 - Took some ROMs from this repo.
4. http://www.multigesture.net/articles/how-to-write-an-emulator-chip-8-interpreter/ - Took font array from here.
5. https://www.zophar.net/pdroms/chip8/chip-8-games-pack.html - Most of the ROMs were taken here.