João Costa @JD557@blog.joaocosta.eu Follow

Portuguese software engineer at Kevel.

My instance is running on a small server so please #nobot

Web

https://www.joaocosta.eu/

GitHub

https://github.com/JD557

Twitter

https://twitter.com/JD557

Itch.io

https://jd557.itch.io

  • Notes
  • Articles 6
  • Followers 48
  • Following 59
João Costa's avatar
João Costa
@JD557@blog.joaocosta.eu

Weekly update on the Chip-8 system:

Added SuperChip support with configurable quirks (original Chip8, Legacy and Modern). This was not that hard and it unlocks a bunch of cooler games.

Unfortunately, since the screen is tiny, some games (like Chipcross) are effectively unplayable. 😬

To cope with all those games, I also added pagination to the game menu, so now I can have 4 pages of 5 games, each with a custom title (like "SuperChip games").

I also toyed around with some AoT compilation logic. I'm hoping that this would reduce power draw (I don't have any easy way to measure it,though... but I had a power meter lying somewhere... I need to find it).

Some games seem to write instructions to memory at runtime (not sure why), so I might need something like an instruction cache that gets invalidated (effectively a JIT).

Also moved the application to a systemd unit to get it to boot a bit earlier. Not perfect, but good enough for now.

On the hardware side, I started designing a 3d printed case and designing the circuit (maybe to print on a PCB). I'm a complete noob at this, so it will probably fail spectacularly. 😅

  • permalink
  • interact from your instance
  • 6 hours ago
  • 1 like
Likes
@vascorsd@mastodon.social
Powered by microblog.pub 2.0.0+dev (source code) and the ActivityPub protocol. Admin.