AC8E - Another CHIP-8 Emulator

A CHIP-8 emulator written in Rust for fun and learning

I've never used Rust before, so this project is my way of trying to get a feel for the language.

If this code isn't 💯 idiomatic Rust, cut me some slack 😄

Update:

At this point, AC8E is working, and is (as far as I can tell) accurate. It's definately not the best CHIP-8 emulator out there, but it's mine, and hey, that's pretty cool.

I might revisit AC8E, refactor it a bit, add a non-terminal based renderer (SDL?), but for now, i'm just going to let AC8E sit.

Check out THOUGHTS.md if you'd like to read my reflections on the project.

How To Run

cargo build --release for a nice, optimized executable. Then, just ./target/ release/ac8e [path to rom].

cargo run [path to rom] for a more quick-and-dirty run.

External Dependencies

Make sure ncurses is installed. If you're on Linux / OSX, this should be a relatively straightforward process.

If you're on Windows, glhf.

How To Switch Renderers

I haven't gotten around to figuring out the right way to switch renderers based on command line arguments, but if you'd like to try out the other renderers, you have to manually modify the let display = ... and let input = ... lines in main.rs to point to the appropriate Display / Input implementations.

Right now, the following interfaces are implemented:

• Null Renderer / Null Input
  • Does nothing, only used for testing
• Terminal Renderer / Null Input
  • Renders line-by-line to the terminal
    • Cripplingly slow (good enough for basic ROMs - eg: MAZE)
  • No interactivity
• Ncurses Renderer / Ncurses Input
  • Default Renderer
  • Uses ncurses-rs to render the display, and get user input
  • NOTE: Requires ncurses to be installed as a system library