We are halfway through week 2 of this quarter and things are ramping up! Between the capstone class (467), Usability Engineering (352) and Mobile Development (492), I’m going to be very busy. I have big quarter-long projects in 352 and 467 that are going to require a lot of work, but should be fun and exciting.
I am most excited to work on my project for 467, a Space Invaders Emulator. Space Invaders was originally released in 1978 as an arcade game, but was adapted to many early platforms like Atari and NES due to its popularity. We’ll be working from a ROM file for the game built to work on the Intel 8080 processor. At this point I don’t know jack about emulation, but that’s what is going to make this project so fun and challenging.
I’m going to have to brush up on my binary, hex, assembly language and C++ programming skills to get this done. Thankfully one of my teammates has built an emulator before, and there are plenty of online resources for building emulators. I know I’m going to learn a lot from this project so I am excited to get started. I have a job lined up to start after graduation where I will be developing operating systems for an aerospace company using C++. I think the experience I gain from this project will be immensely helpful to me once I start work. Not only will I get some good practice with C++, getting experience working with different processors and architectures will be time well spent.
The elective I really wanted to take this quarter was Operating Systems II, but unfortunately OSU was unable to offer it this quarter. So instead I am taking Mobile Development which should be fun as well. I don’t think the experience will serve me quite as well at work but it should be good to learn about regardless.
My last class, Usability Engineering, is only on my schedule because it doesn’t require any coding. Taking 3 classes is challenging enough and I figured I could reduce my coding workload by signing up for it. Honestly I’ve heard the class is a little annoying and requires a lot of writing, but I’m not half bad at writing and It will definitely require less brain power than Cryptography (427) which I would have had to take instead.
All in all I’m super excited for the quarter and to wrap up my time at OSU. It should be a banger of a quarter and all of my team mates seem like really solid folks.
Salute
