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Writing a game on pico-8

Back when we were Playing with Palettes , I justified the whole exercise with my desire to write a little more about old school game design. It turns out that, a while ago, I set out to write a game. A small but full game. From scratch. 
 
 On pico-8.

Color coded

Or “why did I spend a month writing a lexer to display words in pretty colors?”

Funny bugs: the missing byte

For literal years, there was a bug in my emulator that was just sneaky enough to kinda break a few games…

Funny bugs: the missing bit

How much difference a bit makes when forgetting it makes your ROM simply not work on proper emulators or original hardware.

Playing with Game Boy palettes

Writing an emulator is really cool, but what about writing ROMs for a Game Boy emulator? Come see how to program interesting effects using only a color palette. It’s okay, I used plenty of pictures, I promise!

Funny bugs: textures be hard

Directly writing data to a texture isn’t trivial, but it makes for interesting pictures when you get it wrong. Want to see a bunch of buggy screenshots?

This blog is now (mostly) static

I was tired of spending more time fighting WordPress than actually writing, so I got rid of it. Now, I no longer have any excuses for not writing more.

Click here to get a bigger logo!

Wow. Has it been two years already? Oh well… Anyway! 
 So hey, you remember how the Nintendo logo would scroll down when you turned on a Game Boy — and how writing enough of an emulator to see it was kind of the point of most of this blog?

Funny bugs: FIFO overrun

A quick article describing a funny bug, and a nerdy warning against premature optimization.

Writing an emulator: timing is key

We are so close! We now have scrolling pixels and sound. The pixels are scrolling a bit too fast and the sound is still kind of subpar. I won’t be trying to improve sound, but there should be something we can do about that speed issue.

Writing an emulator: sound will do

All right, it took a few extra months, but we’re finally getting somewhere. This article is hopefully the last one about sound. The result isn’t fantastic, but it works. And for the time being, that will do!

Writing an emulator: sound is still complicated

After a long hiatus, I went from outputting crappy sound to outputting crappy sound in stereo . Would you like to know more?

Goholint is going public!

The actual emulator I wrote and which prompted that series of articles on this very blog is finally functional enough that I decided to publish it on GitHub.

Writing an emulator: sound is complicated

Do you know how sound works? Well, me neither, but I hope we can figure it out together!

Writing an emulator: scrolling at last

A quick wrap-up of the last article, with bonus GIFs of the final result.

Writing an emulator: the first (real) pixel

Another article that took longer than I planned because of palettes, but that I tried softening with more pictures, and actual screenshots this time!

Writing an emulator: the first pixel

A much longer — though heavily illustrated — read built on top of the previous article’s code, in which we finally get to show tiles on a low-tech display.

Writing an emulator: memory management

Where I try using crude animations to distract you from the fact I’ve put a lot of effort into turning a program that crashes into one that just hangs.

Writing an emulator: the first steps

A promising start in which, after about 2000 words, I finally get to execute literally three bytes of machine code.

Writing an emulator: its all about the journey!

TL;DR: I started writing a Game Boy emulator in June 2018 and since then, at least three distinct people have expressed mild but polite interest in the details. I hope to show how it’s done, in mildly-to-heavily technical terms. It’s going to take a while but I hope it turns out marginally informative.

Hello world!

It’s been a while since I wrote anything and my usual platform isn’t really suitable anymore, so of course I have set up some overkill self-hosted solution to correct that.

A little therapeutic DIY

Summer isn’t my kind of season. I’m seldom at my best in summer. If anything, I’ve been particularly depressed when temperatures started steadily rising above 25°C, a few weeks ago.

MUSH log parser

Glimpses of an old Python parser for custom tags in MU* logfiles.

NaNoWriMo 2010, the first word count

I like the fact the NaNoWriMo website now stores statistics. It makes me realize how much more disciplined I’ve gotten over the years. But I was bothered by the fact I didn’t have the word count statistics for the very first year I did it.

What's wrong with this picture?

Honestly, what’s the worst, here?

Computer Archeology

How do you call something that’s been working so perfectly for the past ten years that nobody ever felt the need to touch it? 
 Obsolete! 
 … 
 Let me explain…