Dark Bit Factory & Gravity
GENERAL => Projects => Topic started by: ferris on March 29, 2012
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Needing a quick break for my Easter prods, and heavily interested in starting with emulator coding, I figured I'd try to find a shit-simple system that would be cool enough to emulate and could still be done in a matter of days. Turns out such a system exists: The Chip-8.
The Chip-8 is actually a virtual machine, similar to popular VM's like Java except that it was specialized for making game development easier on the COSMAC VIP and Telmac 1800 (8-bit computers from the mid-70's). If you're curious, this wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8) has some great information on how it works.
Needless to say, with a couple nights' work, Chips8TheSalsa is finished :) . Wrote it in C++ using OpenGL for rendering (literally just texture blitting, so nothing fancy should be required) and DirectSound for the beep :) . Works like a standard emu; fire it up and load a ROM image and it starts playing. Some basic options are available and it saves config to disk.
If you're looking for games/demos/whatever, Chip8.com has a very comprehensive program pack (http://chip8.com/?page=109), and Zophar's Domain also has a nice little game pack (http://www.zophar.net/pdroms/chip8/chip-8-games-pack.html) available.
Although it's not a project I care enough about for proper support, let me know if it doesn't work. If it's a small bug or feature request (if that's possible, hehe) I don't see why I shouldn't fix it :) .
Oh yeah, source's included too. Nothing too fancy; it's a bit of a mess in some places but the structure of the program is pretty straightforward.
Enjoy :) .
Bin: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4646373/Chips8TheSalsa-bin.zip
Src: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4646373/Chips8TheSalsa-src.zip
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Awesome work, Ferris. :clap:
I played some of the ROMs - and it creates truley an real oldschool atmosphere (speaking of the 70s) !!!
Would be cool if you would add an optional "fun mode" which does some postprocessing on the GFX (fisheye, distortion, displacement etc).
Anyway, cool stuff. Thanks for sharing!
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That's really retro, welldone!! :)
Maybe MegaChip8Salsa for a break from Summer Demo Party's :D
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Looks very interesting Ferris. I haven't had time to check it out properly yet, but reading the stuff on Wikipedia makes it sound pretty cool.
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Thanks guys :) Yeah, it was a pretty fun little project.
Benny: Cool idea :) Currently back to work on my Easter prods (stocked up on food and caffeine for the next few days so I can hole myself in my room and finish this shit, haha!), but after that I have plans to develop a cross-platform toolkit/emulator framework. This was my first emu, but it will NOT be my last :) . Anyways, once the framework matures a bit I'll port this emu over to make sure it actually works in that context, and once that's done I'd love to add that kind of mode! Would be cool to be able to import custom shaders as well :) .
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Yeah, the idea of a custom shader that performs some post processing is a cool idea.
Keep up the cool work!
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Finally had a chance to look at this. It's pretty cool. Hammered through a couple of levels of 'blitz' from the posted game pack. Very nice Ferris (and really clean and easy to follow code too!).