chip8

Chip8 is an programming language that is interpreted by a virtual machine. Originally written for a home computer in the ’70s, there have been many ports to a variety of different systems.

The virtual machine that I have written (qch_vm) is based on the instruction set at wikipedia.

virtual machine (qch_vm)

The virtual machine consists of several registers and memory blocks. For each clock cycle an instruction is pulled from the relevant memory location and then converted into a function pointer via a lookup table.

libraries (qch_vm)

All of the common functions and data are bundled into a seperate header that can be referenced without including the entire virtual machine implementation.

finite state machines (qch_asm)

The assembly files are parsed into tokens via several finite stame machines.

software rendering (qchip)

The graphics data is taken from the virtual machine and converted into an opengl texture that is displayed full size.