README.md

Introduction

This is a CHIP-8 Virtual Machine built in Python.

Resources

These were the most useful CHIP-8 references used during development:

• Mastering Chip-8
• Cowgod's Chip-8 Reference

Requirements

You need to have Python 3.10+ installed, and SDL2 available on your system.

On macOS:

brew install sdl2

If necessary, ensure your library path includes SDL2:

export LIBRARY_PATH="$LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/homebrew/lib"

On Ubuntu/Linux:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libsdl2-dev pkg-config

Make sure you also have pip and virtualenv installed:

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

To use this project, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository to your local machine:

git clone <repository_url>
cd <repository_name>

2. Run the program with the path to your game file:

python main.py /path/to/game.ch8

Debug Logging

To enable debug logging and save the output to a file (debug.log), use the following command:

DEBUG=1 python main.py /path/to/game.ch8 > debug.log 2>&1

Games

You can find public-domain CHIP-8 games here.

License

This project is released under an open license for educational and personal use.