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CHIP-8 emulators for games
Posted by Xavier on 1 September 2019, 09:44 GMT

In 2018, another implementation of a CHIP-8 emulator for a TI graphing calculator was uploaded into our archives. CHIP-8 is the combination of an interpreted programming language and the corresponding virtual machine for playing the corresponding binaries, introduced in the 1970s. The virtual machine is lightweight (in the original version: 4 KB addressing space, 2 timers, 64x32 graphics area, 16-key hexadecimal keyboard), and therefore, since the late 1970s, CHIP-8, and variants thereof - some of which even support color graphics - have been implemented on a wide range of general-purpose and special-purpose computers, whether they use CPUs or FPGAs. Among the variants is the popular SCHIP(-8), pioneered on the HP-48 in 1990, which spawned a set of new games taking advantage of a dozen additional instructions and double the number of pixels in each direction. You can easily find more information about the CHIP-8 family if you wish :)

So... let's introduce Chip-84, a CHIP-8 emulator/interpreter for the TI-eZ80 series, by Christian "ckosmic" Kosman, open source on Github. It's his first, and so far only, file on ticalc.org. Like most emulators made in the past three decades, it supports SCHIP-8 improvements, and some aspects of emulation can be tweaked at runtime.

I went looking around in our archives, and it happens that they contain at least 46 other implementations of a (S)CHIP-8 emulator for other generations of our favorite graphing calculators, all of them being native code, unsurprisingly. For most of them, the source code and converters (c8 to computer-side format suitable for calculators) are provided; 3 even provide converted ROMs. Some of these implementations were featured in the past. In chronological order:

Be aware that the keyboard layout of the CHIP-8 is slightly peculiar, and worse, that there are no standardized keyboard bindings across ROMs. Living the original (S)CHIP-8 playing experience by discovering the inconsistent key bindings by yourselves is of course an option, but maybe you'll enjoy the games more if you try to find documentation about the relevant keys before playing, for instance in Joe Wingbermuehle's archive ? Beyond that, happy playing :)

Article written by Lionel Debroux, with input from Adrien "Adriweb" Bertrand. Edited on 2019/11/23 to add two other implementations listed in the comments of this news item, which escaped Lionel's search into the ticalc.org archives.

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Re: CHIP-8 emulators for games
Stefan Lennartsson  Account Info
(Web Page)

Great to see a little ode to chip8!
As mentioned there were at least 4 other implementations.
Joe Wingbermuehle did create a version for TI83 quickly after Andreas Ess released his version, making it at least 5.
See URL for the link.

Reply to this comment    2 September 2019, 04:15 GMT


Re: Re: CHIP-8 emulators for games
Lionel Debroux Account Info
(Web Page)

Thanks for the link :)
This one didn't come up directly in my searches for "CHIP-8" or "CHIP8". In today's new searches, my browser didn't mark Ryan's '2013 interview of Joe Wingbermuehle (which links the CHIP-8 emulator you're mentioning) as visited, so I missed it too. Maybe I only looked for files in the archives ?
Anyway... sorry Joe, if you read this, all the more you were kind enough to provide documentation about the key bindings of the games you converted to .83p files ;)

Reply to this comment    2 September 2019, 20:02 GMT

Re: CHIP-8 emulators for games
Jonson26 Account Info
(Web Page)

Actually, if you do some research, you can find, that Noah also made a TI-92+ version. (See link)

Reply to this comment    5 September 2019, 21:46 GMT


Re: Re: CHIP-8 emulators for games
Lionel Debroux Account Info
(Web Page)

Thanks. Likewise, this one doesn't come up with a search for "Chip8", despite containing it in its name...

Reply to this comment    8 September 2019, 18:42 GMT


Re: Re: Re: CHIP-8 emulators for games
Travis Evans  Account Info

Yeah, ticalc.org's on-site search engine is a bit weird/limited. Sometimes I end up searching the site with Google or DuckDuckGo with the “site:ticalc.org” tag to make sure I'm not missing anything. Often it actually works better.

Reply to this comment    9 September 2019, 16:01 GMT

Re: CHIP-8 emulators for games
Weedle  Account Info

With the arrival of C8SALT on the 83+/84+ in TI-BASIC, that makes for a total of 7 CHIP-8 emulators on TI calculators.

Reply to this comment    10 December 2021, 18:56 GMT

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