chip8-aelys

A CHIP-8 CPU interpreter/emulator written entirely in Aelys, my own programming language.

Why?

CHIP-8 is simple enough to implement in a weekend, but complex enough to stress-test a language's fundamentals: bitwise ops, arrays, control flow, FFI, etc

This whole thing is under 500 lines of Aelys. It serves as both a proof that the language can handle real projects and as dogfooding

Building an emulator is a nice way to see what's your language lacking (at the time of this writing, proper switch case/good structs, etc.)

Also, it's quite fun to do !

Quick start

aelys-cli run main.aelys --allow-caps=fs,exec,window,gpu

This loads rom.ch8 from the script directory by default. If you want to specify a ROM:

aelys-cli run main.aelys --allow-caps=fs,exec,window,gpu -- path/to/rom.ch8

Keypad

CHIP-8 uses a 16-key hex keypad. Mapped to:

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      Z X C V

Requirements

• Aelys >= 0.19.7
• The opengl native module from there (bundled as opengl.dll / opengl.so), but I already included it in the repo !