Crisp8 is a backend of a chip-8 emulator. It handles all the chip-8 instructions while allowing different frontends to be written for drawing and playing sound. Crisp-8 takes an array of bytes as input and exposes functions to execute instructions or provide internal information of the emulated machine. It is up to the frontend to:
- Print to the screen
- Supply callbacks for input and audio
- Do the looping
- Read the program file from disk (the backend only interprets it)
Look at the files in include/public. Also, you have to call srand somewhere in your program for the chip-8's random instruction.
Examples of some of parts of the API can be found in the examples directory. For a complete example of a frontend (though currently without the debugging interface) you may want to look at crisp8-sdl.
Building crisp8 requires a c compiler, cmake and make. If you're on windows I recommend mingw-w64 which comes with mingw32-make.
- Create a build directory and cd into it
mkdir build
cd build- Execute cmake. This is the time to choose which configuration options you want to compile in. Look them up in the options part of CMakeLists.txt.
cmake [-D<OPTION>=<ON|OFF>] ..- Execute make
make- Optionally execute make install to install the library and headers to wherever you defined CMAKE_PREFIX_DIR to be
make install- Profit?
- Create a build directory and cd into it
mkdir build
cd build- Execute cmake and specify the type of build system you want. The only one I have tested are mingw makefiles. This is also the time to choose which configuration options you want to compile in. Look them up in the options part of CMakeLists.txt.
cmake -G "MinGW Makefiles" [-D<OPTION>=<ON|OFF>] ..- Execute make (assuming you're using mingw)
mingw32-make- Optionally execute make install to install the library and headers to wherever you defined CMAKE_PREFIX_DIR to be
mingw32-make install- Profit?
I don't own a mac, but I'm sure it can't be to different from linux.
Q: Why is it called crisp-8?
A: Because I had just finished a book by an english author when I decided on the name.
Q: Why do you mix crisp8 and chip8 in the source code?
A: All references to the program are written as crisp8 (such as function name prefixes). References to the chip-8 machine are written as chip8 (such as the chip8 type). Yes this was a bad idea, and yes I have probably mixed them up in the code causing lots of confusion. You live and you learn.
Q: Why does this section exist?
A: I've always wanted to write an faq, but no one ever asks anything.
GPL3