CHIP-8 emulation with C# and Blazor - part 1
CHIP-8 emulation with C# and Blazor - part 1

CHIP-8 emulation with C# and Blazor - part 1

2021, Apr 23    

I have always been a fan of emulators and retrogaming in general. I even started writing my own 8080 emulator, but I haven’t managed to complete it (yet).

Emulating a complete system is no easy task, as you have to replicate all the inner complexities and micro-instructions.

Being the curious type I am, I decided to take a step back and find the easiest system possible to emulate. And after a bit of research (mostly on StackOverflow and Wikipedia), I stumbled on the CHIP-8!

Honestly, I had no idea it existed, but apparently, it had a quite active community in the late 70s. At its heart, it’s not really a physical machine, but rather an

“interpreted programming language, running on a virtual machine. It was made to allow video games to be more easily programmed” (Wikipedia)

The specs are quite easy:

  • 4k total memory
  • 16 8-bit data registers, called V (from 0 to F)
  • a 16-bit address register, called I
  • a stack (size might vary in each implementation, usually it’s 48 bytes)
  • a keyboard with 16 keys
  • a monochrome 64x32 display

That’s it! These can be quickly reproduced in a C# class like this:

public class Cpu
{
	private readonly byte[] _memory = new byte[0x1000];        
  private readonly byte[] _v = new byte[16];
  private ushort  _i  =  0;
  private readonly ushort[] _stack = new ushort[16];

	private const int SCREEN_WIDTH = 64;
  private const int SCREEN_HEIGHT = 32;
  private readonly bool[,] _screen = new bool[SCREEN_WIDTH, SCREEN_HEIGHT];
}

In addition to those, we also need two more fields to track the Program Counter and the current Stack position:

private ushort _pc = 0;
private byte _sp = 0;

This is already a good start. The next step is to implement each Opcode. Wikipedia still tells us that:

CHIP-8 has 35 opcodes, which are all two bytes long and stored big-endian.

There’s a nice table on that Wikipedia article with the entire list so I’m not going to replicate it here. In order to emulate these opcodes, I am using a struct to represent its data

public readonly struct OpCode
{
  public ushort Data { get; }
  public byte Set { get; }
  public ushort NNN { get; }
  public byte NN { get; }
  public byte N { get; }
  public byte X { get; }
  public byte Y { get; }
}

… and a Dictionary<byte, Action<OpCode>> to link it to the function to execute.

So, for, example the 0xFX1E instruction, which simply adds the content of the memory at location VX to the I register, simply translates into this:

private void AddVRegToI(OpCode opCode){
	_i += _v[opCode.X];
}

At this point, once we have read the ROM file into the _memory array, we can start processing the opcodes:

public void Tick()
{
    ushort data = (ushort)(_memory[_pc++] << 8 | _memory[_pc++]);
    var opCode = new OpCode(data);

    if (_instructions.TryGetValue(opCode.Set, out var instruction))
        instruction(opCode);
}

That’s it for today! I’ve pushed all the source on GitHub, so feel free to take a look.

The next time we’ll see how we can run the emulator in a Blazor WASM application. Ciao!

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