Emulators: Chip8

DrChip8

This is Reesy's first emulator, and he wrote it while learning ARM ASM (the emulator is 100 per cent coded in it), in the hope to work on a bigger project later (see DrSMS). This emulator works incredibly well, and has a nice menu system. The only version of this emulator available comes with a whole bunch of games built in. However, it looks like these games are freely distributed on the internet as freeware.

Since the Chip8 uses way more keys than the GBA has, you have to configure the controls (via the GUI) for each game. Check out chip8.txt from the download links for a listing of controls for some games.

Chip8

This Chip8 emulator is by the author of GBonGBA, based on Vision8. The website doesn't have much additional information. However, this is actually a really sweet emulator, with full compatibility. Also, since the Chip8 is so old, the roms are pretty freely available for this system, and the library of games packaged with this emulator only runs to around 60k. To add roms, type the following in DOS:

copy /b chip8.gba+chipgame chipgame.gba

If you're not interested in doing manual copying, check out chip8ToGBA, which has some games built-in. This was contributed by alepus and written by gba_boy.

8Ball

This Chip8/superchip emulator for the GBA is in an early stage of development, and not really too usable yet. A snippet from the homepage reads:

"At the moment there's no way to add Chip8 programs without recompiling 8Ball, so you can only play Ant, which is compiled into this version. Use left/right to move the ant and A to jump. R saves the interpreter state to SRAM, and L loads it again. Start resets the interpreter. Be careful with the saving/loading function: If you try to load a game and no valid savegame is in the SRAM, all sorts of funny things might happen!"