I wrote a custom assembler for CHIP-8 in C++
Details
- External ID
- 49744174
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I wrote a custom assembler for CHIP-8 in C++
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Sept. 17, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 28
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7910685805422647
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 21, 2026, 5:02 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 21, 2026, 5:02 p.m.
Description
I'm writing a custom assembler for CHIP-8 and just finished adding support for the DB/.byte directive so I can embed sprites in the ROM and finally get something drawn on the screen. It SHOULD support all OG CHIP-8 instructions, but still a ton of rough edges that I'm ironing out.This is my first ever C++ project, just like the CHIP-8 emulator was my first ever C (and emudev) project. It's so satisfying to write assembly and have your program spit out a ROM that actually runs in the emulator you wrote.All code is written by me (a lot of it livestreaming) as evident by the quality, no AI.
Enrichment
- Theme
- indie hacker passion projects
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- chip-8 assembler in c++ for retro developers
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes A CHIP-8 assembler is an introductory computer science project with a simple instruction set (only 35 opcodes) that modern AI models can generate and debug effortlessly.
Discussion
4 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: out-of-bounds RAM access bug in 'I' register
Competitors
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Attention rank: #38 of 124 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 323 days after the earliest competitor.
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Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
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