Octojam 3: A CHIP-8 Game Jam | Hacker News Reader

Octojam 3: A CHIP-8 Game Jam

awfuljams.com

There were video recordings of playthroughs of every game from the previous two years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-FROP4pYe0 (2014)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxPoscaB8aE (2015)

Glitch Ghost seemed to be the favorite of 2014 https://youtu.be/B-FROP4pYe0?t=17m37s

If anyone's interested, I just added the source to a CHIP-8/SCHIP emulator I wrote in Java/OpenGL (through LWJGL) waaay back in the day. It's got a unique rendering style (screenshot at repository) and a hack to try and smooth out the flicker from XOR rendering you get in the original.

https://github.com/westoncb/java-chip8-emulator

It might take a minute to get it set up with an old version of lwjgl, but at least the source is there for now. I'll try and get it working and commit the necessary lib files later today, but thought I'd at least make the source available for now.

A bit off topic, but if anyone wants to code review/check out my C CHIP-8 emulator using SDL2, I'd love some feedback!

https://github.com/scanlong/c8

I see that you used Cowgod's Chip8 reference. That document gets a number of details subtly wrong. In particular, shift and load/store instructions. I strongly encourage referring to the more accurate "Mastering Chip8":

http://mattmik.com/files/chip8/mastering/chip8.html

Since everyone else seems to be posting theirs, here's my CHIP-8 emulator written in C with a GTK+ frontend:

https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/chip8

Side note: I used this project to learn both C and GTK+, so there are undoubtedly some bad practices etc.

I used to have a chip-8 emulator on my HP48 calculator 20 years ago. Amazing that this kind of software sticks around so long.

Oh, it was old even then. It was originally for 1970s microcomputers.

I should look into CHIP-8. It seems cool.

Mind, I'm not really sure what it is, or where to start...

I just started writing a CHIP-8 emulator yesterday. I have no idea what I'm doing!

The resources on the Octojam site may be useful, and Octo can make it easier to produce ROMs for testing purposes. (that's how the project started!)

If you're running into specific problems and you need advice, ask away!

Awesome. I didn't know. I'm going to try to get as far as I can using my rudimentary knowledge of how an emulator is supposed to behave and a reference to opcodes and such.

When you say to just ask, do you mean here on hn?

Sure. If it's a question that might be relevant to Octo (especially things to do with quirks modes or programming techniques or ergonomics) you can ask a question on the Octo Github page or mailing list.

Despite the widespread cursory interest in CHIP-8, as exemplified in all the VM implementations in this comment thread alone, there isn't currently any sort of centralized community for it. The users and developers of Octo are open to furnishing that to the extent they're able.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com