Show HN: Chip-8 emulator written in JavaScript

35 pointsposted 10 months ago
by atum47

10 Comments

atum47

10 months ago

Hi everyone, this was my first attempt at writing an emulator. I went with the Chip 8 cause it seemed to be the easiest one. I then used tiny.js to manage some aspects of the display; I was trying to emulate that glow from an old monitor

bitwize

10 months ago

Ah, CHIP-8, arguably the world's first fantasy console.

atum47

10 months ago

I'm just gonna come out and say it this ideia came from either Claude or ChatGPT. I thought the GBA was the easiest console to write an emulator for, but after talking to either one of those LLM I learned about Chip 8. All I wanted was to write an emulator that I could make some post processing on the output.

bitwize

10 months ago

What makes CHIP-8 great for babby's first emu is the fact that it's not a real CPU or system architecture; it's a VM to make video games for the Cosmac VIP 1970s hobbyist computer easy to write.

Don't worry about your use of an LLM. If it spits out something that gives you a holy-crap idea, that's great. Things get iffy when you lean on the LLM to do the work.