A WebAssembly CHIP-8 Emulator is an intriguing project developed by Colin Eberhardt. It serves as a CHIP-8 emulator written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly. This project is created for the fun of it and to explore the capabilities of Rust and WebAssembly in emulating the CHIP-8, a simple, interpreted programming language from the 1970s.
The emulator brings together modern programming practices with classic computing principles. The code is thoroughly explained in an accompanying blog post, offering insights into the development process and the challenges faced during the implementation.
This project leverages the relatively new wasm32-unknown-unknown target, which is essential for compiling Rust code to WebAssembly. The instructions for setting up this target are provided in the setup guide. Once the environment is set up, building the project is straightforward by running the provided build script.
The CHIP-8 emulator itself is designed to faithfully recreate the behavior of the original CHIP-8 environment, allowing users to load and run CHIP-8 programs directly in their web browsers. The use of WebAssembly ensures that the emulator runs efficiently and effectively, making full use of modern web capabilities.