I love these types of vms that have deliberately limited specs. Really makes you sink your teeth into solving problems creatively with minimal resources.
It inspired me to start zig8[1], my own CHIP-8 emulator. It's not ready for prime time yet but it's getting there. When it's ready I hope it will have a visual debugger and feel good: fast, better shaders, better sound, good defaults, etc.
CHIP-8 is a neat system. If you're interested in emulation it's a great place to start in my humble opinion. It's simple enough that you can finish it before deciding whether you like writing emulators.
Hopefully interest in CHIP-8 would pick up again, it's a neat bit of history and a cool little system.
Discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097671
It should've had a more dedicated vibrant community if it weren't the many incompabilities among the different emulators implementations out there, all due to people using cowgod's chip-8 tecnical reference as the single source of truth[0], which itself is based on David Winter's original implementation which contained a few inaccuracies on some instructions behavior from the original COSMAC VIP interpreter.
anthk•1mo ago
On a Chip8 interpreter written in AWK and a bit of help of coreutils (to mimick getchar in C to pick a single char; if you can do it under AWK without resorting to GNU od or read, kudos):
https://git.luxferre.top/dale-8a/log.html
OpenBSD and the rest of BSD users: you need to install 'coreutils' from ports, open 'dale8a.wk' and 'tgl.awk' and rename 'od -' to 'ggod -' .
Proof that it works:
https://0x0.st/KC_k.png