Retro CHIP-8 emulator (re)released for iPhone

This is one for the more hardcore retro gamers out there, as despite the proliferation of CHIP-8 interpreters written in the mid to late '70s to make it easier to write games for a variety of computers, there were never all that many games for it.

Now a stalwart CHIP-8 fan has put together an iPhone emulator (one of the only emus to be found on the App Store) called, rather unimaginatively, Chip-8 Emulator, which comes bundled with a bunch of blocky, pixelated, nostalgic games. This is his second iteration of the emulator, after he already created a J2ME version.

What’s interesting is that in the late '80s CHIP-8 had something of a revival when it was employed to make games programming possible on a bunch of large screen graphic calculators, and looking at the screenshots it’s this period that seems to have influenced the emulator’s iPhone design.

Chip-8 Emulator shows us what early Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Breakout and Tron games looked like, along with racing, Pong and noughts and crosses variations.

Apple generally doesn’t look too favourably on apps that allow you to launch foreign executables (in this case the game ROMs), but hopefully Chip-8 Emulator could mark the beginning of a new range of iPhone retro emulators.

Probably not, though.