Longer-form writing: notes on programming vintage hardware, things I have repaired, and the occasional opinion about modern software.
How to write GameBoy Advance (GBA) homebrew using modern tools and systems in 2020. Compilers, editors, debugging and more!
This isn’t the definitive way of doing things, but it’s a way that seems to work for me. Also you might read this and think it a bit convoluted and full on. I didn’t create it all in one go, it’s a workflow that has evolved over time.
A short comparison between low level Z80 assembler and high level C
The beating heart of any CPU is the fetch-decode-execute cycle. It is the same for our simulator
Sometimes you have to type out almost identical lines of code, and it’s either time consuming or error prone. Here’s how to avoid it all by using some clever Excel techniques.
How to efficiently store and execute many small functions, without using a single if statement or switch construct.
To begin, this isn’t technically an emulator, the system I’m trying to model isn’t real. This is more of a simulator, but that’s less of a catchy search word on the Internet.
Day 1 of the GitHub Game Off jam, where I create a basic platform controller and level builder.
As a challenge I thought I’d try to implement the Minimum Spanning Tree algorithm, and have a play with it. My code is based off the excellent Coding Train video on the same topic which you can watch here. It’s where I got the code from, and then mixed in some code from the Arrays of Objects video too.
This week I took part in the One Lone Coder 2019 game jam. The theme of this was “destruction”… My entry was started Friday, a mere 48 hours before the deadline. Yes, a week long jam where I had a whole seven days to come up with an idea was started 48h before the end…
The main issue I had this time was thinking up an idea that felt good enough to be a game. I had a bunch of half-ideas, but none of them seemed that great. Since the theme was quite broad, I could have knocked out any kind of generic shooting game, stuck on some pretty explosions and called it done. It didn’t feel like a particularly exciting game idea though so I ditched those kinds of ideas and looked around for some better inspiration.
Between the 9th and 16th August 2019 I took part in the Godot Wild Jam #12. Let’s go through what it was like, and the things I learned this time.
