Chip-8 interpreter in C++

Yet another Chip-8 interpreter, this time written in C++ using GLFW and OpenGL as its graphics library. It uses Dear ImGui to draw the GUI.

Why C++?

Because I wanted to get my hands dirty with modern C++. Last time I did C++ was C++98 2 years ago for school.

Screenies

CPU Interface

2021-10-15-174233-c.mp4

Screen recording of the snake game running with the chip-8 interpreter

Building

In theory, it should run anywhere where Dear ImGui and C++ runs and OpenGL is available. But I only tested it on Windows.

Windows

You will need cmake, llvm, make and git.

• $ git clone https://github.com/gargakshit/chip-8 --recursive

  Use --recursive as the repo contains GLFW and Dear ImGui as submodules

• $ cmake -Bbuild -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=clang -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER="clang++" -G "MinGW Makefiles" .

  This will produce MinGW Makefiles with clang++ as the C++ compiler. You can optionally add the flag -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release to generate MinGW Makefiles for the release build. The release build is optimized.

• $ cmake --build build

  This will build the binary. If everything is successful, the interpreter binary will be produced with build/chip8.exe as the path. At this point, you could run your favorite Chip-8 "ROMs" by dragging them and dropping it onto the binary in the file explorer, or by using a terminal and running build/chip8 path/to/my/program.ch8. I have included some programs in the programs/ directory to play with (shout out to the original program authors)

You can also build with VS and MSVC toolchains, but I have not tested them personally

Is this any good?

Yes.