alt.hn

12/6/2025 at 11:17:58 AM

Octo: A Chip8 IDE

by tosh

12/12/2025 at 3:24:17 PM

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.

[0] https://beyondloom.com/blog/octojam.html

[1] https://github.com/agentultra/zig8

by agentultra

12/12/2025 at 5:35:06 PM

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.

Discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097671

by azhenley

12/12/2025 at 3:47:00 PM

Yes. I consider Octo feature-complete, but I still address bug reports.

by RodgerTheGreat

12/12/2025 at 6:11:30 PM

That’s awesome! Also thanks for making Octo.

by agentultra

12/12/2025 at 5:48:48 PM

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 inaccuracies on some instructions behavior from the original COSMAC VIP interpreter.

[0]: http://devernay.free.fr/hacks/chip8/C8TECH10.HTM

by flykespice

12/12/2025 at 5:55:19 PM

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.

by RodgerTheGreat

12/12/2025 at 11:51:01 AM

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):

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

by anthk

12/12/2025 at 1:13:04 PM

Very cool. Reminds me of the Pico8.

I love these types of vms that have deliberately limited specs. Really makes you sink your teeth into solving problems creatively with minimal resources.

by throwaway613745

12/12/2025 at 4:22:02 PM

pico 8 still does not have an Android version for some reason.

by dizhn

12/12/2025 at 5:07:46 PM

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.

by Tiberium