chip8

After porting a CHIP-8 emulator to Rust (repo on GitHub), I decided to come back to trying new languages, feeling like Rust isn’t at a state where I would consider writing new code in it. So if not Rust, what kind shiny new thing is around on the block? Zig Zig has been around some time now, the community is active but didn’t grow into large scale yet. It seems to aim at low-level programmers, as a safer alternative to C with a lean feature set and better performance....

tl;dr: I ported my CHIP-8 emulator to Rust. Amongst game dev circles, Rust is certainly getting a lot of attention recently, especially since Ready At Dawn announced they would be switching entirely to Rust for newly-written code. This is certainly a big thing, coming from such an experienced studio (we gamedevs are notoriously picky when adopting new libraries/languages), and proves that Rust is taken seriously for replacing C++. Personally, I tend to dislike C++ and its ecosystem, and couldn’t be happier that new languages try address the need for a superior paradigm....

Thought it was a fun idea to implement a very basic emulator so I did just that! My CHIP-8 emu can run most vanilla ROMs without problems. It’s a simple 8bits computer with a rather reduced instruction set, so it wasn’t too much pain to get things going. I used the publicly available ROMs for testing as well as a bunch of custom unit tests. I have to say it was a fun little side projet, especially since I didn’t have to write any of the games for it, just load that ROM and here we go!...