Show HN: Chip-8 emulator written in JavaScript

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35 points·atum47··10 comments

Hi everyone, this was my first attempt at writing an emulator. I went with the Chip 8 cause it seemed to be the easiest one. I then used tiny.js to manage some aspects of the display; I was trying to emulate that glow from an old monitor

I've used this guide [1] to help me understand the instructions.

1 - https://tobiasvl.github.io/blog/write-a-chip-8-emulator

https://esolangs.org/wiki/BytePusher

If you want to go again but with only a single instruction.

Didn't you post this a few days ago?

Yeah, I posted it once 6 days ago but it didn't made the front page so I posted it again 3 days afterwards. That's it

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=atum47

Ah, CHIP-8, arguably the world's first fantasy console.

I'm just gonna come out and say it this ideia came from either Claude or ChatGPT. I thought the GBA was the easiest console to write an emulator for, but after talking to either one of those LLM I learned about Chip 8. All I wanted was to write an emulator that I could make some post processing on the output.

What makes CHIP-8 great for babby's first emu is the fact that it's not a real CPU or system architecture; it's a VM to make video games for the Cosmac VIP 1970s hobbyist computer easy to write.

Don't worry about your use of an LLM. If it spits out something that gives you a holy-crap idea, that's great. Things get iffy when you lean on the LLM to do the work.

Nice work!

thanks

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