I read a Hacker News article titled “My Most Important Project Was a Bytecode Interpreter” and got to thinking, “Hey, that’s not a bad idea.” After going through the comments and reading about similar projects, I stumbled across this introduction to Chip8 emulation and knew that I had found my next project.
Chip8 is a 1970’s era programming language made by Joseph Weisbecker and adopted by a handful of systems over the years. Each system would interpret the program to run on its own hardware. You can read a comprehensive system spec here. Today’s hardware is the web so I’ve written a browser-based emulator with a TypeScript interpreter. After spending several years at higher levels of abstraction for web applications it was nice to dig in to the lower levels again – bit manipulation, stack management, etc. This is just the beginning, though, and I hope to go a bit further by making my own program to run on the Chip8
Enough talk, check out the emulator for yourself.