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Mission: C17 Systems Mastery via CHIP-8 Emulator

[!NOTE] Overarching Goal Master production-grade ISO C17 systems programming by completing, optimizing, and hardening the CHIP-8 Emulator codebase into a high-performance, memory-safe, fully-featured native systems application with modern CMake tooling and sanitizers.

🎯 Why

Transition from Node.js / web development into low-level systems engineering. Building an emulator in C provides hands-on mastery over the core pillars of systems programming:

Binary file parsing & endianness reconstruction: Safe stream processing, boundary validation, and loading ROMs directly into memory at 0x200.
Low-level bitwise manipulation & opcode decoding: Masking nibbles (0xF000, 0x0F00, 0x0FFF) to decode and dispatch 35 instructions.
Memory architecture & pointer lifetimes: Struct alignment, tail padding, and memory layout mapped in C Knowledge Diagnostics.
High-frequency CPU execution cycles: Dispatching via function pointer jump tables or direct threaded code and 60Hz timer synchronization.
Hardware abstraction & pixel framebuffer manipulation: SDL2 texture streaming and bitwise XOR graphics rendering.
Production build systems & diagnostics: CMake build automation, strict warnings (-Wall -Wextra -Wpedantic), defensive programming, and dynamic runtime sanitizers (ASan/UBSan).

🏆 Success Looks Like

Transition chip-8-emu/c from Makefile to a modern CMakeLists.txt with automatic SDL2 finding, strict compiler flags, and ASan/UBSan debug targets.
Implement robust ROM loading from disk (fopen, fread, error handling, size validation, loading to 0x200 as specified in CHIP-8 Memory Specs).
Build the complete 35-opcode instruction decoding and execution engine using clean C17 idioms (bitmask extraction and function pointer jump tables).
Implement 60Hz Delay and Sound timers synchronized with the emulation cycle.
Optimize the XOR graphics rendering engine (DXYN) and screen buffer with SDL2 texture streaming.
Eliminate all potential Undefined Behavior (UB), integer overflow bugs, and pointer bugs, verified with AddressSanitizer.
Add an interactive CLI disassembler / debugger mode for stepping through ROM instructions.

⚙️ Constraints & Environment

Project Path: /Users/morfes/projects/chip-8-emu/c (git@github.com:M0rfes/chip8_emu.git).
Standard: ISO C17 (-std=c17).
Platforms: macOS (Apple Silicon / Clang) & Linux (x86_64 / GCC & Clang).
Libraries: SDL2 for graphics/audio/input.
Build System: CMake.
Core Reference: Vault CHIP-8 Specification.