Chip-8 emulator, 2 chip-8 emulator – Toshiba Rockbox F Series User Manual

Page 111

Advertising
background image

Chapter 10.

Plugins

111

10.3.2 Chip-8 Emulator

Chip8 is a kind of assembly language for a long-gone architecture. This plugin runs
games written using the chip8 instructions. To start a game open a .ch8 file in the File
Browser

There are lots of tiny Chip8 games (usually only about 256 bytes to a couple of

KB) which were made popular by the HP48 calculator’s emulator for them. The orig-
inal Chip8 had 64x32 pixel graphics, and the new superchip emulator supports 128x64
graphics.

The only problem is that they are based on a 4x4 keyboard, but since most games do

not use all of the buttons, this can easily be worked around.

To do this, one may put a .c8k file with the same name as the original program

which contains new key mappings (for BLINKY.ch8, one writes a BLINKY.c8k file). That
.c8k file contains 16 characters describing the mapping from the Chip8 keyboard to
the default key mapping (that way, several Chip8 keys can be pressed using only one
Rockbox key). For example, a file containing the single line:

Code

0122458469ABCDEF

would correspond to the following non-default mappings:

3 → 2, 6 → 8, 7 →4, 8 → 6.
The default keymappings are:

Chip8

Off

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

A

B

C

D

E

F

Key

P

o

w

er

Men

u

Up

V

olume

do

wn

Select

Righ

t

V

olume

up

Do

wn

Some places where can you can find .ch8 files:

• The PluginChip8 page on www.rockbox.org has several attached: Z

PluginChip8

• Check out the HP48 chip games section:

http://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/games/chip/

• PC emulator by the guy who wrote the HP48 emulator:

http://www.pdc.kth.se/

lfo/chip8/CHIP8.htm

• Links to other chip8 emulators:

http://www.zophar.net/chip8.html

The Rockbox manual

Toshiba Gigabeat F Series

Advertising