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I want to learn how to build emulators for CHIP-8 and Gameboy and am having the person tug-of-war over assembly, C, or Rust. With hindsight, do you recommend do

by pwpw 4y ago

I want to learn how to build emulators for CHIP-8 and Gameboy and am having the person tug-of-war over assembly, C, or Rust. With hindsight, do you recommend doing them in assembly? And what resources did you use to get started?

HideousKojima 4y ago
I wrote my CHIP-8 emulator in C#, actually. I used the Godot game engine for rendering and sound (though I never actually got around to implementing sound). The language you write it in really doesn't matter too much unless you really care about performance, or if you want to do something fancier than an interpreter (like a JIT recompiler). I used this guide: https://tobiasvl.github.io/blog/write-a-chip-8-emulator/ https://tobiasvl.github.io/blog/write-a-chip-8-emulator/ I haven't made a Gameboy emulator, just learned the assembly so I could modify some roms.
gotlou 4y ago
I wrote a CHIP-8 emulator[0] a while back in C using SDL2 for rendering everything. It still has a couple issues with the timers and taking input. I was new to C back then so I did this project to become more familiar with it. You can check out my blog post[1] if you're interested how I went about it (there are a couple resources at the bottom I used to build it, including the one that HideousKojima recommended). As for language, in hindsight, C was fine. CHIP-8 is so basic that you don't really need to worry about performance or to implement a JIT compiler unless you want to learn how to do those things specifically. Just pick any one out of the three (assembly is a bit of a weird choice though, why not write a CHIP-8 emulator and then a brand new program to run on that emulator in CHIP-8 assembly if you want to learn assembly?) As for Gameboy, it would have more instructions, a different graphics system, sound etc. and overall be more complicated than CHIP-8. Try it out if you either feel a bit more adventurous or have implemented CHIP-8. [0](https://sr.ht/~gotlou/chip8-emulator https://sr.ht/~gotlou/chip8-emulator) [1](https://gotlou.srht.site/chip8-emulator.html https://gotlou.srht.site/chip8-emulator.html)

by pwpw 4y ago

HideousKojima 4y ago

I wrote my CHIP-8 emulator in C#, actually. I used the Godot game engine for rendering and sound (though I never actually got around to implementing sound). The language you write it in really doesn't matter too much unless you really care about performance, or if you want to do something fancier than an interpreter (like a JIT recompiler). I used this guide: https://tobiasvl.github.io/blog/write-a-chip-8-emulator/ https://tobiasvl.github.io/blog/write-a-chip-8-emulator/ I haven't made a Gameboy emulator, just learned the assembly so I could modify some roms.

gotlou 4y ago

I wrote a CHIP-8 emulator[0] a while back in C using SDL2 for rendering everything. It still has a couple issues with the timers and taking input. I was new to C back then so I did this project to become more familiar with it. You can check out my blog post[1] if you're interested how I went about it (there are a couple resources at the bottom I used to build it, including the one that HideousKojima recommended). As for language, in hindsight, C was fine. CHIP-8 is so basic that you don't really need to worry about performance or to implement a JIT compiler unless you want to learn how to do those things specifically. Just pick any one out of the three (assembly is a bit of a weird choice though, why not write a CHIP-8 emulator and then a brand new program to run on that emulator in CHIP-8 assembly if you want to learn assembly?) As for Gameboy, it would have more instructions, a different graphics system, sound etc. and overall be more complicated than CHIP-8. Try it out if you either feel a bit more adventurous or have implemented CHIP-8. [0](https://sr.ht/~gotlou/chip8-emulator https://sr.ht/~gotlou/chip8-emulator) [1](https://gotlou.srht.site/chip8-emulator.html https://gotlou.srht.site/chip8-emulator.html)