About

This is a CHIP-8 emulator written in Typescript. I created this project over the course of four days. While developing the emulator, I decided to test it by writting an assembler. This proved to be very valuable when debugging the game. Seeing how cool it was to see what was being executed, I decided to write a disassembler as well. It's not perfect yet, but I think it's still cool.

FAQ

What is CHIP-8?

CHIP-8 is a simple, interpreted, programming language developed for various computer systems during the late 1970's to early 1980's. It was designed for programming simple games.

Why is the game not running at the correct speed?

There is no standard for how CHIP-8 games are supposed to run, because it's not a real system. I set the default setting to what felt decent enough for most of the games I tested. Your mileage may vary. If you find the game is not running at the correct speed, try modifying the CPU Speed setting. You may need to increase this value if you are running the game at a low framerate.

By default, the emulator will request an animation frame for each 'drw' and 'cls' instruction. If you find the game slowing dramatically when multiple sprites are being drawn, try modifying the 'Display on Draw' setting.

I pressed the Load button, but nothing happened. What did I do wrong?

If you refreshed the page, you will need to reselect your ROM before you can load it.

Why does the disassembled output have weird instructions?

The disassembler is completely agnostic about whether a word is an instruction or just data and treats all code points as instructions. Therefore, the disassembled output may have nonsensical instructions or be filled with 'word' instructions. This does not affect the assembled output as the instructions will assemble to the correct bytes.

Another issue is that the disassembler will scan odd addresses for 'jp', 'call', and 'ld i, ...' instructions. As a result, the disassembler may place labels in places they probably don't belong, causing the following couple instructions to be based on the wrong bytes. Like the previous, this does not affect the assembled output as the 'byte' and other instructions will assemble to the correct bytes. This is something I look to fix in the future by handling address scanning in a better way.

When using this tool to create a source, you will probably need to modify the output to clarify the intent of code.

Why do the sprites flicker? Is it a bug?

This is a consequence of how CHIP-8 draws to the screen and is not an emulation bug.