wip gameboy blog

.ltex/ltex.dictionary.en-US.txt

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+syscall
+syscalls
+alloced

.ltex/ltex.disabledRules.en-US.txt

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+GAMEBOY
+UPPERCASE_SENTENCE_START

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+{"rule":"GAMEBOY","sentence":"^\\QI recently mentioned on Twitter that I made a gameboy game with some friends during my first year of college.\\E$"}
+{"rule":"YOUTUBE","sentence":"^\\QBtw if you're interested, checkout Retro Game Mechanics Explained on youtube, especially his SNES series which is phenomenal.\\E$"}

content/blogs/gameboy-jam/index.md

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+---
+title: "A game(boy jam) story"
+description: ""
+date: 2024-08-15
+tags: ["gameboy", "asm", "school", "gamejam"]
+draft: true
+---
+
+I recently mentioned on Twitter that I made a gameboy game with some friends during my first year of college. Since there's some cool stuff to showcase, here's a blog about it!
+
+## Context
+
+This is some context to explain why we decided to make a gameboy game and a bit of background, if you don't care feel free to directly skip to [the first paragraph](#space-shooter).
+
+### Introduction
+
+Quickly after starting college, I made some friends in my year group and some who were already in the 3rd year of college. All courses in the first year of my college were in C and the second year contained lot of C, C++ and one assembly course. It was common for students to have low-level side projects. My friends in 3rd year were doing a gameboy emulator.
+
+It looked incredibly fun, they would barge in the room with their laptop in hand like "LOOK IT WORKS" and you would see a Pikachu in the screen, saying a BAURHAU because the sound system was broken.
+
+![Pokemon yellow](./pokeyellow.jpg "Imagine Pikachu saying BAURHAU instead of PIKA")
+
+Naturally, with friends of our year we decided to also make an emulator: a SNES one. This project is completely unrelated to this story, but that's how we learned how assembly & retro games worked. While this was not the same CPU, we made a disassembly and implemented instructions, learned about DMA & some hacks that games abused to run on limited hardware. Btw if you're interested, checkout [Retro Game Mechanics Explained](https://www.youtube.com/@RGMechEx) on youtube, especially his [SNES series](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHQ0utQyFw5KCcj1ljIhExH_lvGwfn6GV) which is phenomenal.
+
+### Why a gameboy game?
+
+We had a teacher that pushed us to do as much crazy stuff as possible (that's how I ended up making a xml parser in C for a game project...) Since the game jam war organized by the school, he started teasing our friends saying stuff like "for the game jam, you're going to make a gameboy game, right?". Of course, he was not serious, but the idea was already growing in our heads. We decided to make this game with our group of 6 (4 3rd year that did the gameboy emulator and me & a friend who did the snes emulator). One of us thought this would be a huge failure and refused to work on the asm side. He instead thought it would be cool to make a real cartridge that could run roms in a real hardware.
+
+## Space shooter
+
+### Initial goal
+
+The game jam started, we had a weekend to make our game. The theme was announced a Friday at 18h, and we needed to make a keynote/presentation of the game on the Monday morning (even if we failed). We had access to everything in the school 24/24, even the electronics stuff. The theme for this jam was `Space`.
+
+Since we wanted to make the simplest game possible, it didn't take us long (approximately 10ms) to settle on the game idea: a space shooter.
+> On a side note, I don't think we ever decided something this quickly :3
+
+We wrote on a whiteboard what we wanted to do and started working. At the end of the weekend, the board looked like this:
+
+![planning whiteboard](./todo.jpg "Our planning whiteboard")
+Here's the same board but in text & English:
+
+| Must                                  | Should                         | Could     |
+| :------------------------------------ | :----------------------------- | :-------- |
+| {{< icon "check" >}} Move             | {{< icon "check" >}} Game over | ~multi~   |
+| {{< icon "check" >}} Obstacle         | {{< icon "check" >}} Music     | ~Colors~  |
+| {{< icon "check" >}} Shoot            | Enemies can shoot              | Power ups |
+| {{< icon "check" >}} Moving obstacles | Lifes                          |           |
+| {{< icon "check" >}} SFX              | ~cant read sorry~              |           |
+| {{< icon "check" >}} Get hit          | Flash                          |           |
+| {{< icon "check" >}} Simple menues    | {{< icon "check" >}} Boss      |           |
+|                                       | {{< icon "check" >}} Intro     |           |
+|                                       | {{< icon "check" >}} Score     |           |
+
+Turns out we overestimated the difficulty of the thing, we made a playable POC before going home (at 2am).
+
+It might sound complicated, but you don't have much to understand in order to write code. We have less than 256 instructions. Once you dedup via parameters (because `increment register a` is a different instruction than `increment register b`), you end up with only 44 instruction types (and that's counting the 13 bitshift instructions & the 7 interrupt instruction [like `stop` that stops the CPU]).
+
+![instruction list](./opcodes.jpg "The grid of all instruction available")
+
+The game boy doesn't have an OS. This means you don't have to deal with syscalls or to share memory. Allocating memory become easier:
+
+ - You look at `constant.asm` which can look like (note that `$` means hexadecimal):
+
+   ```asm
+   ; Game registers
+   DEF FRAME_COUNTER EQU $C000
+   DEF HARDWARE_TYPE EQU $C001
+   DEF RANDOM_REGISTER EQU $C002
+   DEF PLAYER_STRUCT EQU $C003
+   ```
+
+ - You find an empty address (like `$C005` for example, because `PLAYER_STRUCT` takes 2 bytes).
+ - You shoot in the room "Is `$C005` taken?", if nobody answers add a line in `constant.asm` like
+
+   ```asm
+   DEF BOSS_DEATH_COUNTER EQU $C005
+   ```
+   congratulation you just alloced memory (forever). Until you merge your code, you must inform others that your address is used.
+
+Jokes aside, this means you can write at any arbitrary addresses so your struct or variables are just magic addresses.
+
+This logic is applied everywhere, since everything is memory mapped. 
+
+There's no GPU or fancy graphic system, the gameboy (and most consoles of the time) had a PPU instead: a `Picture Processing Unit`. This thing can display sprite, background and even has palettes/colors if you are on a gameboy color. 
+
+
+### Cool stuff
+
+## Break the target
+
+### Oh shit
+
+### But wait
+
+## Conclusion

content/blogs/go-is-mid/index.md

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+---
+title: "Go is mid (by design)"
+description: ""
+date: 2024-08-10
+tags: ["golang", "language"]
+draft: true
+---
+
++
+ package manager (best existing)
+ battery included std
+ very simple, very readable
+
+=
+ errors
+  + as value
+  - no tooling arround this (errdefer, ?/try)
+  - easy to miss (no warning when you discord an error)
+
+-
+ type system (inexistant)
+  no sum types
+  ptrs (whyyy) - optional? mutable? you cant' know
+ std designed before generics (simple things like math.Abs)
+ std feels half baked (hard to use API, see sqlx, all the http handlers...)