Category: Emulators

When I was a kid my parents got me and my brothers a brand new Game Boy. I used to play it a lot, and I was mesmerized and amazed at how such a tiny brick could give life to so many wonderful worlds. Some of my favorite games were Super Mario Land (1, 2, and 3, Wario Land), The Amazing Spider-Man, and Kirby’s Dream Land. We also had some other games, like Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle or Tetris, that I also played quite a lot. I remember fondly too.

I’ve written about the CHIP-8 machine before. It is a very simple interpreted programming language that can be implemented without much hassle by anyone interested in getting their feet wet with emulators. It is commonly regarded as the “hello world” of emulators.

Some time ago I decided to implement a CHIP-8 emulator in Rust as my second project written in that language. My first foray into the language was the porting of the Gaia Sky LOD catalog generation tool from Java. This allowed us to substantially increase the generation speed and dramatically (really) decrease the memory consumption of the processing, to the point where a processing that previously needed more than 2 TB of RAM could now be done with less than a hundred gigs. Back to the topic at hand, I called my implementation rchip8 (very creative). This post describes the process and structure of such an emulator with more or less detail.