Crusty-8 is a... you guessed it! It's a Chip-8 interpreter. It can handle 35 different instructions, contains a whopping 4Kb of RAM (that's 4096 bytes!) and outputs to a monochrome 64 x 32 pixel display.
But what sets this implementation apart from all the others? Well, I made it! Even though this is a simple project, I'm still happy to have finished it. It's a really manageable entry point for emulation and was a fitting choice for my first contact with Rust.
If you have any suggestions or remarks, please let me know.
In order to build the interpreter, a recent Rust toolchain has to be installed. An easy way is to use rustup. Afterwards it's just a matter of navigating into the repository folder and entering:
$ cargo build --releaseAfter the build process the final binary is located at ./target/release/.
Run it with at least the path to a rom in order to get started:
$ ./crusty-8 --path <path-to-rom>Apart from the path, one can also adjust the refresh rate and set a drawing mode. By default the contents of the framebuffer get drawn to the screen after every cycle, which can be changed by adding the -a or --authentic flag. This makes sure that the window only gets refreshed after the actual draw instruction (0xDXYN), which makes for a slightly choppier experience.
I mainly used Matthew Mikolay's Mastering Chip-8 for the implementation, with the occasional look at the Wikipedia page.
Being completely new to Rust, there were also multiple occasions were I took inspiration from Colin Eberhardt's wasm-chip8-project. I wanted to do as much as possible on my own, but some things I just couldn't unsee, like his handling of the 0xFX0A-instruction.
And finally the roms included in this repository were collected by Martijn Wenting from Revival Studios.
I'm grateful that these resources exist, so thank you :).