CHIP8 thread

[Dax]

Now I have input working, so all that's left is to fix are CPU bugs, make a new GUI, and eventually add sChip support.

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[Dax]

New update: I'll probably be ready for release tomorrow, if I can get Super Chip emulation down pat tonight, since as far as I know, all current chip8 games that I have run 100%. It shouldn't take long to make a functional GUI without bugs.

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[Chrono Archangel]

good work!
move on to GB after that with me. it might keep me motivated if someone else is also working on it XD

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[dreampeppers99]

After I build my SChip8 (JChip8BR) Emulator I've moved to a NES Emulator
The Cpu core is 100% (I believe) the most of debugger tools (to cpu, memory and ppu) are functional, disassembler too ! The screenshots bellow:
screenshots - jnesbr - Screenshots of jnesbr emulator & debugger. - Google Code
The main site:
jnesbr - Google Code

My current stage-task is emulate the ppu
This could be a addiction ! (I mean dev emulators or even try)

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The Empyrean

[Chrono Archangel]

haha, yeah that's what I did... at first. My Chip8 emu was in a "good enough" state and I decided to do a NES emu in C#. Started on the CPU a bit and kinda never touched it after that. I recently fixed all the remaining bugs in my Chip8 emu and have now decided to do a GB emu in the same language (x++)

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When Pigs Fly: The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide.

[Dax]

Well, I don't know if I'll continue after chip8. I don't think I have the skill, personally. Chip8 was hard enough as is. But anyway, enough of the negatives. I think I'll make a release today with Super Chip disabled, since it's only about 50% done, just to prove that this C# code actually does something.

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[Hatorijr]

hey chrono i am actually currently working on a gameboy emu in c#, after i took a long enough break i am working on it again, just finished a good sizable chunk of the cpu, about to work on timers and than graphics which i suspect may just burn my brain to a crisp XD.

[Dax]

Well, sorry for the broken promise of releasing two weeks ago, but I decided to move on to Space Invaders for now[I have my confidence back, as I understand quite a bit more than I did before]. Once I feel confident to do the scrolling opcodes in Chip8, I'll do one of two things: 1) Make a double release of both SI AND CHIP8 at the same time, 2) release Chip8 when it's ready. We'll see.

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[runawayprisoner]

Well, still looking forward to the release, Dax.

And here's an update on my part:



Though it's like a slideshow in Super Chip mode, it's still so satisfying watching this...

Edit: Here's Ant:



Edit 2:

Version 2 of the filter... now with diagonal smoothing as well:







Hmm... I think I'll do a release for this one as soon as I iron a couple of bugs... (certain corners are not smoothed), and improve performance to the "playable" range on my system. It's still unbearably slow.

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cChip interpreter WIP - current status: Release Candidate
LRx Filter RC - current performance rating: 9/10

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Last edited by runawayprisoner; May 28th, 2009 at 07:51..

[dreampeppers99]

Great job runawayprisoner

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The Empyrean

[runawayprisoner]

Thanks. More pictures:

Ant with correct diagonal blending:


And Maze to demonstrate the efficiency of the diagonal blender:


Performance is okay on a Celeron L or a Core 2 (or Pentium Dual-Core) but anything lower than those might have problems, so... I'd love to improve performance more before I release this version of the emulator.

You may still have the source code to it if you want.

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cChip interpreter WIP - current status: Release Candidate
LRx Filter RC - current performance rating: 9/10

[dreampeppers99]

runawayprisoner, you could let the user choose the two colors... this could raise a great impression... I made it look.

ps: I also let the pixel format (circle, rect...)

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The Empyrean

[runawayprisoner]

Why leave it at two colors?



I'm fiddling around with this now... apparently, Car is the only game that works right with it so far, but I'm close enough to say that it's going to turn into something...

Edit: Actually, Car is perfect:



Other games might be having problems with the collision flags and the sprite cache from what I can see... hmm...

Time to do more tests.

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cChip interpreter WIP - current status: Release Candidate
LRx Filter RC - current performance rating: 9/10

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Last edited by runawayprisoner; May 29th, 2009 at 18:25..

[dreampeppers99]

Originally Posted by runawayprisoner

Why leave it at two colors?
I'm fiddling around with this now... apparently, Car is the only game that works right with it so far, but I'm close enough to say that it's going to turn into something...

My skills just enable me to make it with two colors!

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The Empyrean

[runawayprisoner]

Originally Posted by dreampeppers99

My skills just enable me to make it with two colors!

You can put more colors in. My preliminary technique is to cache the addresses of the sprites (just catch the address in register I) then compare them and see if we're drawing the same sprite, then apply the same color to the pixels.

That works perfect with Car because Car doesn't seem to use the collision flag much or at all... (it mostly depends on the scrolling function to work). Anyway, I'll do more tests... Seems like more modifications to the drawing algorithm is in order as well...

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cChip interpreter WIP - current status: Release Candidate
LRx Filter RC - current performance rating: 9/10

[dreampeppers99]

Originally Posted by runawayprisoner

You can put more colors in. My preliminary technique is to cache the addresses of the sprites (just catch the address in register I) then compare them and see if we're drawing the same sprite, then apply the same color to the pixels.

That works perfect with Car because Car doesn't seem to use the collision flag much or at all... (it mostly depends on the scrolling function to work). Anyway, I'll do more tests... Seems like more modifications to the drawing algorithm is in order as well...

Great idea, indeed amazing!
Congratulations! The emu scene needs guys like you.

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The Empyrean

[V1ncent]

Awesome work! And those games weren't even designed to have colours.

[Hatorijr]

very interesting concept, i still need to find time to finish what i am currently working on so i can go back and recode my chip 8 so that i can put it into a releasable format. as sdldotnet is a far cry from being useful for my needs, it uses to much memory due to the issues it has, but when recoded, it should be using directx so it will work a lot better than it does right now. who knows maybe i can put in a few new features like that lol.

[runawayprisoner]

Thanks for the comments.

Apparently, it's really... fun meddling about... from what you can see. :P The hard part, actually, is trying to figure out how to separate sprites because after one collision, sprite data would overlap each other in the draw routine...

But a second buffer helped overcome that... and... here's the results:

Ant in colors!!







Still a few bugs now and then, and this game has so many sprites that it saturates my color palette. I'm up to 20 colors now and it's still asking for more. But these are some very encouraging results. I think I can get a color system working fairly well for most games by the end of the week... though one problem remains: to get an optimal experience, the player has to go through the array of sprites in the game and color each and every sprite (so animation sprites can be set to have the same color but there's no way to automagically detect that at this time). Thanksfully, that's it. The filter will do the rest for you.

Edit:

More Ant in colors, and a screenshot of Sokoban, my favorite puzzle game.





Right now, it's a battle between perfect Sokoban coloring and perfect Worm 4 coloring because both do collisions in different ways...

Edit 2:
Almost giving up on Worm 4... but I think I'll use a timer to kill that bug, and then... it'll be happy coloring all over!

Finally, since the last time, a lot of games are working right now. A few exceptions being Brix and Worm 4... and god knows what else, but I know Ant, Car, Loopz, and a few others are almost perfect.

Here's Loopz in all of its glory. This game supposedly wouldn't work in a lot of emulators due to the implementation of the HP48 registers or so... but I made it work somehow...

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cChip interpreter WIP - current status: Release Candidate
LRx Filter RC - current performance rating: 9/10

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Last edited by runawayprisoner; May 30th, 2009 at 03:58..

[hap]

Ohh Sokoban in colour!

Does it work well in your emu? I've seen it messing up on later levels on some emulators due to a bug with carry,
like this: V[F]=carry; V[x]=calculation;
while it should be: int temp=carry; V[x]=calculation; V[F]=carry;
The 1st implementation would cause a problem with eg. "add V[0],v[F]".