chip-8 go

A CHIP-8 emulator written in Go, featuring a TUI interface.

This project was mostly written for myself so that I could learn Go and how to build TUI apps. I also built this for Hack Club Macondo.

Demo

chip8-go-demo.mp4

Features

• Blazing fast terminal rendering using only Unicode characters
• Virtual keypad support for both legacy terminals (e.g. xterm) and modern terminals (e.g. kitty)
• Built-in file browser for selecting ROMs
• Pause functionality
• Interactive help menu
• Customizable display palette

Building

Manual

Firstly, install Go on your machine.

Then, to compile chip8-go, run go build ./cmd/tui.

Automatic

To automatically compile binaries for all operating systems and architectures, run the build.bash script:

chmod +x ./build.bash
./build.bash

A clean.bash script is also provided to delete all binaries:

chmod +x ./clean.bash
./clean.bash

Usage

Now you can execute the binary to launch the program (e.g. ./chip-8).

It takes an optional argument specifying the path to a ROM.

Custom Frontends

The internal folder contains all core CHIP-8 logic and data. You can use the chip8 package to implement any type of frontend you want (not limited to just TUI).

See cmd/tui/main.go to understand how to implement your own frontend.

Authors

• @omrawaley

Related

Here are some related projects of mine:

• Game Boy Emulator (C++)
• CHIP-8 emulator, debugger, and disassembler (C++)
• CHIP-8 emulator rewrite (Rust)

License

MIT