Chapter 10.
Plugins
111
10.3.2 Chip-8 Emulator
Chip8 is a kind of assembly language for a long-gone architecture. This plugin runs
games written using the chip8 instructions. To start a game open a
.ch8
file in the
File
Browser
There are lots of tiny Chip8 games (usually only about 256 bytes to a couple of
KB) which were made popular by the HP48 calculator’s emulator for them. The orig-
inal Chip8 had 64x32 pixel graphics, and the new superchip emulator supports 128x64
graphics.
The only problem is that they are based on a 4x4 keyboard, but since most games do
not use all of the buttons, this can easily be worked around.
To do this, one may put a
.c8k
file with the same name as the original program
which contains new key mappings (for
BLINKY.ch8
, one writes a
BLINKY.c8k
file). That
.c8k
file contains 16 characters describing the mapping from the Chip8 keyboard to
the default key mapping (that way, several Chip8 keys can be pressed using only one
Rockbox key). For example, a file containing the single line:
Code
0122458469ABCDEF
would correspond to the following non-default mappings:
3
→
2, 6
→
8, 7
→
4, 8
→
6.
The default keymappings are:
Chip8
Off
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
A
B
C
D
E
F
Key
P
o
w
er
Men
u
Up
V
olume
do
wn
Select
Righ
t
V
olume
up
Do
wn
Some places where can you can find
.ch8
files:
•
The PluginChip8 page on www.rockbox.org has several attached:
Z
PluginChip8
•
Check out the HP48 chip games section:
http://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/games/chip/
•
PC emulator by the guy who wrote the HP48 emulator:
http://www.pdc.kth.se/
∼
lfo/chip8/CHIP8.htm
•
Links to other chip8 emulators:
http://www.zophar.net/chip8.html
The Rockbox manual
Toshiba Gigabeat F Series