chipster

A lightweight CHIP-8 emulator written in Rust with minimal dependencies and clean architecture.

Motivation

I wanted to deep dive a bit more into low-level emulation in Rust and tackle a simpler project before attempting to write a Game Boy Advance (GBA) emulator.

Performance

Since this project is focused on correctness and clarity, it only incorporates some micro-optimizations like bitwise opcode parsing.

Key Map Translation

Classic CHIP-8 Keypad	QWERTY Keyboard Mapping
1 2 3 C 4 5 6 D 7 8 9 E A 0 B F	1 2 3 4 Q W E R A S D F Z X C V

---

Getting started

Prerequisites

You need the Rust toolchain installed. If you don't have it yet, set it up via rustup.rs.

Installing and running

• Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/dnlzrgz/chipster
cd chipster

• Run a ROM by providing its file path:

cargo run --release -- "./demos/Maze (alt) [David Winter, 199x].ch8"

Resources

• Wikipedia for the high-level description of CHIP-8.
• Chip-8 Technical Reference v1.0 for the detailed opcode descriptions and implementations notes.
• Another Chip-8 Emulator (in Rust) is the step-by-step walkthrough I mainly followed and use as inspiration.
• Building a CHIP-8 Emulator [C++] is a clearer and deeper explanation.

Note

The ROMs in this repository have been extracted from kripod/chip8-roms.