Is it still being maintained? There used to be a game jam, Octojam, that was stopped years ago[0]. Seems mostly out of a lack of interest? Would be cool if it revived.
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.
I'm running a jam that starts Sunday called Langjam Gamejam that might interest you then. You have to make your own language and then use that to make a game. We have >120 people signed up and I'm expecting quite a few of the submissions to be similar to Chip8 or PICO8.
Yes. I consider Octo feature-complete, but I still address bug reports.
agentultra 3 days ago [-]
That’s awesome! Also thanks for making Octo.
flykespice 3 days ago [-]
Chip8 is the rite of passage for many emulator devs due to its simplicity, it can be implemented on virtually every 1 cent microcontroller out there.
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.
It's rather disheartening to see new chip8-related projects which reference Octo, modern test ROMs written with Octo, and still see a citation for cowgod's egregiously incomplete and misleading documentation.
anthk 3 days ago [-]
I love these tiny VM's, thanks to emulation I'm there since two decades.
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):
I love these types of vms that have deliberately limited specs. Really makes you sink your teeth into solving problems creatively with minimal resources.
dizhn 3 days ago [-]
pico 8 still does not have an Android version for some reason.
Tiberium 3 days ago [-]
At least you can play a lot of the Pico-8 games through the website for free - their player shows virtual controller buttons, although for some games it can be awkward.
Rendered at 09:04:27 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
[0] https://beyondloom.com/blog/octojam.html
[1] https://github.com/agentultra/zig8
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.
[0]: http://devernay.free.fr/hacks/chip8/C8TECH10.HTM
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
I love these types of vms that have deliberately limited specs. Really makes you sink your teeth into solving problems creatively with minimal resources.