octal_cookie

This was my refresher project to get back into lower-level programming — specifically the Odin language and Raylib. Building a CHIP-8 emulator felt like the right scope: small enough to actually finish, but with enough surface area (opcode decoding, memory, timers, a display, input) to shake the rust off.

It's not perfect, but it's functioning and usable for the most part. Compiles to native and to WebAssembly, and the web build is playable directly at the link above.

Features

Full CHIP-8 instruction set emulation
Simulator GUI with dedicated panels for the screen, CPU state, keypad, file loader, memory viewer, and control bar
Built-in collection of classic game ROMs (Pong, Tetris, Space Invaders, Brix, and more)
Load your own ROMs via the file loader panel
Dev and release build modes via make
Compiles to WebAssembly for running in-browser

Roadmap

Future work, mainly once I'm back in the headspace for it:

General refactor/cleanup pass now that the core is working
CHIP-8 quirks support (configurable behavior differences between interpreters)
SUPER-CHIP instruction support

Dependencies

Odin compiler
Raylib (used via Odin's vendor bindings)
tinyfiledialogs (included under external/)

Building

# Run directly in dev mode
make

# Build a dev binary
make dev

# Build an optimised release binary
make release

# Clean build output
make clean

The output binary is named my_app by default. You can change APP_NAME in the Makefile.

Included ROMs

A set of public domain game ROMs is bundled under assets/game_roms/:

15PUZZLE · BLINKY · BLITZ · BRIX · CONNECT4 · GUESS · HIDDEN · INVADERS · KALEID · MAZE · MERLIN · MISSILE · PONG · PONG2 · PUZZLE · SYZYGY · TANK · TETRIS · TICTAC · UFO · VBRIX · VERS · WIPEOFF

Test ROMs are available under assets/test_roms/ for development and debugging.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

README.md

Octal Cookie

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