Emulation-as-a-Service

Node.Js Chip-8 Emulator Service

This project is a event driven chip-8 emulator running on server-side which sends output data to a Socket.IO client and offers simple API to interact with

You can check out a client example here

Setup

After clone repo, just run npm install to adquire the dependencies and npm start or node server.js to start the server

Docs

Your Socket.IO client must implement the following code

//creates socket instance from Socket.IO
var socket = io("server url here, running in your local network should be somethin like http://localhost:12345")

//listen for server's output events
socket.on('display', PixelArray => {/**your code here**/ } )
socket.on('beep', ( ) => {/**your code here**/ } )
socket.on('getRomsResponse', RomsList => {/**your code here**/ } )

//emit events to server
socket.emit('getRoms')
socket.emit('loadRom', romName)
socket.emit('keyStateUpdate',  {value: keyValue, state: false})

Events Description

Server's output

Display > This event receives the argument PixelArray, an Array of 2048 (Chip-8 original display has the size of 64 x 32) pixels that composes the screen, each pixel can be 0 (A background pixel, you don't have to render it) or 1 (A sprite pixel, must be rendered)
Beep > When this event is trigerred, your client must emit some sound
GetRomsResponse >This event receives an Array containing the name of all roms inside the /ROMS folder, you can put your own roms into this folder as well

Server's input

getRoms > Causes the server to activate "getRomsResponse" event
loadRom > Causes server to load and run the rom with the which was passed as argument, the server will search by this rom in /ROMS folder
keyStateUpdate > Chip-8 holds the state of 16 keys (keys are: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F) as user input, when one of these key is pressed or released, you must send to server an object {value: Integer, state: Boolean}, where value is any integer from 0 to 15, and state is a boolean where true means the key is pressed and 0 means the key is not pressed

This emulator is still in progess, some roms may not run correctly and the emulator can show some inconsistency

Feel free to leave a pull request