CHIP-8 Emulator

Small CHIP-8 Emulator written in Rust. The emulator currently implements the original CHIP-8 instruction set and provides keyboard input, sound and display rendering for running ROMs.

Keyboard input is mapped to the original CHIP-8 keypad layout as follows:

CHIP-8					Keyboard
1	2	3	C	→	1	2	3	4
4	5	6	D	→	Q	W	E	R
7	8	9	E	→	A	S	D	F
A	0	B	F	→	Y	X	C	V

Usage

Run a CHIP-8 ROM:

./chip8 <path/to/rom>

Configuration

On first launch, a default config file is generated. It allows customization of the emulator, including:

• Display colors — on/off pixel colors (RGB)
• CPU speed — instructions executed per second
• Quirks — toggle behavior for CHIP-8 instruction edge cases that vary between original interpreters and later implementations (e.g. SHIFT, LOAD/STORE, JUMP)

Build from source

Prerequisites

• Rust (stable toolchain, includes Cargo)

System dependencies

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu):

sudo apt install build-essential cmake libglfw3-dev libgl1-mesa-dev pkg-config libasound2-dev libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev libxrandr-dev libxinerama-dev libxcursor-dev libxi-dev

Linux (Arch):

sudo pacman -S pkg-config alsa-lib cmake base-devel wayland wayland-protocols libxkbcommon libxrandr libxinerama libxcursor libxi

Build

git clone https://github.com/oreisacher/chip8-emulator.git
cd chip8-emulator
cargo build --release

The compiled binary will be at target/release/chip8.

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