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.
Or “why did I spend a month writing a lexer to display words in pretty colors?”
For literal years, there was a bug in my emulator that was just sneaky enough to kinda break a few games…
How much difference a bit makes when forgetting it makes your ROM simply not work on proper emulators or original hardware.
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!
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?
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.
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?
A quick article describing a funny bug, and a nerdy warning against premature optimization.
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.
