CHIP-8 is the canonical first project in the r/EmuDev community for exactly the reason this task exists: 35 opcodes are enough to teach fetch-decode-execute, memory-mapped state, and bitwise sprite drawing without the years of hardware quirks a real console demands. Every technique here — big-endian opcode decoding, a call stack, XOR-based drawing — reappears at higher stakes in the NES and Game Boy tasks later in this track.