Progress on Chip 8 to date.

So, where are we at? Well, I'm up to version 15 for the Processing version of the Chip 8 emulator/debugger. It's slow and tiny but has taught me a lot about the attributes of Chip 8, Java, Processing, version control and perseverance.
Still have to work out what chip 8 thinks it's getting when keys are pressed. Pretty sure it looks for a 0x01 when a "1" is pressed and not 0x31 that I programmed it with.Think it's time this phase is finished and put to bed so then I can start on the Arduino version.

Finished finally version 0.1 of Processing Chip8

By attacking one instruction, sometimes two each day, I've finally got all the Chip 8 instructions working ok in the slow test version of the Chip8 emulator written in the excellent but quirky language, Processing. This was done over the Xmas break where I ate and drank too much so I'm quite pleased I stuck at it. Now I've got to get the real programs running in the interpreter I've made. There's heaps on the 'net and I thought I'd start off with the old favourite, Pong. That's tomorrow. Maybe the day after as it's fully social tomorrow. Above is a screen shot of a project coming to a close. At least that phase.

Well I finally got the sprites to work OK. At least the little play I've had today. Problem has been how to get the rules for black-white dots for the four different cases and just what is a collision. The key is to concentrate on the white dots in the sprite, that is the 1's. A 1 onto a 1 gives a zero, a black dot and a 1 onto a 0 gives a white dot. The others stay the same. I don't have an EXOR function in the Processing language so had to bit-twiddle.

Here's some code that took a while:

void drawSpriteByte2(int x, int y, byte sprite) { // put byte at scrn x,y
int v15 =0, pixIndex=0, change=0;
color colorOfPixel,newPix=black;
loadPixels();

for (int i = 0;i<8;i++) {
change=0; //don't flick pixels unless we have to
pixIndex = y*width+x+i; //Might have to change to long later
colorOfPixel=pixels[pixIndex]; //current pixel, might change
if((colorOfPixel == black) && (bit(7-i,sprite) == 1)) {
newPix = white; change = 1;
// println("Drawn a white dot on black x,y pixPos "+ x + " " +y +" " +y*width+x+i+ " "+ pixIndex);
}
if((colorOfPixel == white) && (bit(7-i,sprite) == 1)) {
newPix = black;
change = 1; v15 =1;
// println("Drawn a black dot on black x,y pixPos ");
// v15 = 1;
}
if(change==1){
pixels[pixIndex] = newPix;
// println("Putting in colour-->at "+hex(newPix)+" "+ pixIndex);
}
}
//pixels[pixIndex] = white;
//pixels[1930] = white;
updatePixels();
}

void test_drawSpriteByte2() {
drawSpriteByte2(28,25,byte(0x22));
}

Had another go at some old-fashioned Chip8 programs today. Tried to get chip8.exe emulator going again. Never had much luck in the past. This time I managed to get screens like the one above. I never really saw that much of the screen as it was a buzzing, jerky mess with not much response to key presses. Still, considering the way computers have changed since 1998 it's amazing to get something almost working.

First posting

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Where's all the news about Chip8? Someone's just got to address this.