The final chapter in my journey at Oregon State University has begun. OSU CS467 is my final class that I need to complete in order to graduate with a BS in Computer Science. The goal of this class is to work on a project of our choice (with approval from the Professor). I’ve teamed up with two individuals, Kento Woolery and Ted Kim, to develop and place our own spin on an Intel 8080 Emulator that will be able to disassemble and run a Space Invaders ROM file.

We are all excited to start coding away and working on the emulator, but we are still in the planning stages and we realize that working in a team is very different from working alone. When working alone, there isn’t a need to come up with an agreement between the team members on the team’s standards because you are the entire team. And while you still should make a plan or outline for a project, it’s just your ideas, your way of doing things.

But that isn’t necessarily better than working with others. In a creative or technical process such as developing software, I feel like working in a team is actually better. It’s easier to bounce ideas off of team members than it is to come up with something on your own. It’s better to have a set of standards that everyone follows and enforces when coding or performing code reviews.

So, I am excited to have the opportunity to work with Kento and Ted on a project we all are interested in and will be able to make our own in some way. We don’t want to just create a command line emulator that mounts a ROM and be done with it. I mean, it’s just too simple. We want to do more. Add a GUI? Implement controller and mouse+keyboard inputs? Maybe have options to emulate other Intel CPU’s to run other ROMs?

But who knows, we’re still planning and I’m sure we’ll add on more if we finish with time to spare. That’s the beauty of working in a team, and that’s what’s great about this class. We can make the project ours, and that’s definitely what we will do.