Kronch 🍫

A simple CHIP-8 Emulator written in C!

Requires Raylib.

Overview

CHIP-8 is regarded by some as an interpreted programming language. It is meant to serve as a "fantasy" hardware instruction set. This is my attempt at making an emulator capable of running software written to be used on that architecture.

I created this software mainly as a challenge to myself, since I have long been fascinated by emulators and their innter workings. I feel that I still have much to learn, but I am really glad to have learned what I have learned so far. I hope to eventually apply these principles later on, especially as I learn more about software virtualization and containerization.

A demo of me running this emulator can be found here.

Development Environment

To develop this emulator, I used:

• Neovim (as my IDE)
• Raylib (Graphics library)
• The C compiler provided by the GNU Compiler Collection

Useful Websites

Here are some resources that proved most helpful to me:

• Source code for JohnEarnest's OCTO, a CHIP-8 IDE, which includes a very well-made JavaScript implementation
• Wikipedia's page on the CHIP-8 (although its lack of documentation on hardware quirks may have slowed me down overall)
• Tobias V. Langhoff's Guide to making a CHIP-8 emulator
• Timendus's CHIP-8 Test Suite, a powerful collection of test ROMs that really helped me identify what little things I got wrong

Usage (Linux)

1. git clone https://github.com/pgattic/kronch && cd kronch
2. make
3. ./kronch [ROM].ch8

The output binary is called "kronch". After compiling, you can install the emulator system-wide with:

4. sudo make install
5. Start the emulator with kronch [ROM].ch8

Usage (others)

1. Try running gcc src/main.c -o kronch -lraylib -lGL -lm -lpthread -ldl -lrt from the root of this repository! No guarantees that it will all work on other operating systems.