Is it still being maintained? There used to be a game jam, Octojam, that was stopped years ago[0]. Seems mostly out of a lack of interest? Would be cool if it revived.
It inspired me to start zig8[1], my own CHIP-8 emulator. It's not ready for prime time yet but it's getting there. When it's ready I hope it will have a visual debugger and feel good: fast, better shaders, better sound, good defaults, etc.
CHIP-8 is a neat system. If you're interested in emulation it's a great place to start in my humble opinion. It's simple enough that you can finish it before deciding whether you like writing emulators.
Hopefully interest in CHIP-8 would pick up again, it's a neat bit of history and a cool little system.
I'm running a jam that starts Sunday called Langjam Gamejam that might interest you then. You have to make your own language and then use that to make a game. We have >120 people signed up and I'm expecting quite a few of the submissions to be similar to Chip8 or PICO8.
Chip8 is the rite of passage for many emulator devs due to its simplicity, it can be implemented on virtually every 1 cent microcontroller out there.
It should've had a more dedicated vibrant community if it weren't the many incompabilities among the different emulators implementations out there, all due to people using cowgod's chip-8 tecnical reference as the single source of truth[0], which itself is based on David Winter's original implementation which contained a few inaccuracions on some instructions behavior from the original COSMAC VIP interpreter.
It's rather disheartening to see new chip8-related projects which reference Octo, modern test ROMs written with Octo, and still see a citation for cowgod's egregiously incomplete and misleading documentation.
I love these tiny VM's, thanks to emulation I'm there since two decades.
On a Chip8 interpreter written in AWK and a bit of help of coreutils (to mimick getchar in C to pick a single char; if you can do it under AWK without resorting to GNU od or read, kudos):
I love these types of vms that have deliberately limited specs. Really makes you sink your teeth into solving problems creatively with minimal resources.
At least you can play a lot of the Pico-8 games through the website for free - their player shows virtual controller buttons, although for some games it can be awkward.
It inspired me to start zig8[1], my own CHIP-8 emulator. It's not ready for prime time yet but it's getting there. When it's ready I hope it will have a visual debugger and feel good: fast, better shaders, better sound, good defaults, etc.
CHIP-8 is a neat system. If you're interested in emulation it's a great place to start in my humble opinion. It's simple enough that you can finish it before deciding whether you like writing emulators.
Hopefully interest in CHIP-8 would pick up again, it's a neat bit of history and a cool little system.
[0] https://beyondloom.com/blog/octojam.html
[1] https://github.com/agentultra/zig8
Discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097671
It should've had a more dedicated vibrant community if it weren't the many incompabilities among the different emulators implementations out there, all due to people using cowgod's chip-8 tecnical reference as the single source of truth[0], which itself is based on David Winter's original implementation which contained a few inaccuracions on some instructions behavior from the original COSMAC VIP interpreter.
[0]: http://devernay.free.fr/hacks/chip8/C8TECH10.HTM
On a Chip8 interpreter written in AWK and a bit of help of coreutils (to mimick getchar in C to pick a single char; if you can do it under AWK without resorting to GNU od or read, kudos):
https://git.luxferre.top/dale-8a/log.html
OpenBSD and the rest of BSD users: you need to install 'coreutils' from ports, open 'dale8a.wk' and 'tgl.awk' and rename 'od -' to 'ggod -' .
Proof that it works:
https://0x0.st/KC_k.png
I love these types of vms that have deliberately limited specs. Really makes you sink your teeth into solving problems creatively with minimal resources.