In the mid '70s there were game consoles in kit form sold by RCA. These consoles ran a virtual machine on them called Chip-8 (Yes VMs in the 70s). A friend of mine mentioned that as a exercise to learn C/C++ he was implementing a Chip-8 VM. Which got me thinking, I wonder how efficiently I could implement a Chip-8 VM on the Game-O.
Well I was quite surprised, it took a little optimizing, but it really runs very well and the entire VM is written in managed code, a VM running a VM.
The only things I have not implemented is sound and keyboard input. The keyboard on the original Chip-8 machines was a 16 key keypad (I wish I ordered that keypad module), so I need to decide which keys to map to the Game-O keys. As for sound, well, after opening my Game-O a few times the speaker wires broke off so I can’t do much with sound until I fix that.
Attached are a few screen shots of original Chip-8 ROMS running on the emulator. Once the keyboard stuff is done I will post the code.
Unfortunately my coding time is limited to weekends mostly, so it will have to wait for this weekend before I can map the keys and then release the code.
