Month: February 2022

This week was very productive. I got the interrupts and timing implemented as well as the framebuffer. I didn’t have time in the middle of the week to work on the project but we are far along enough that I’m confident I will make more productive strides going into the weekend. All the pieces are in place and it’s really just a matter of debugging at this point. The team has been great and I honestly have no complaints or suggestions at this point. We are at the final stretch and I think we are all confident that the project will be a success.

Lots of productive work this week! I worked on 3 pair programming sessions with Josh this week and we got a lot of work done! It was very productive and I’m really glad I had the opportunity to work this way as I feel like it helped me massively increase my contribution threshold as well as increase productivity across the board. I think I will continue to open up call on Microsoft Teams that anyone can join when I work to keep this momentum up through the week.

We only have a couple of key opcodes left and while we are a bit behind on our initial week to week planning goals, I believe the bulk of the work was always going to be the opcodes so I feel that we will be back on track once this part is behind us. In other words, it makes sense to me that the opcode implementation portion would naturally take a bit more than a week but I feel future week long sessions will go by faster and put us back on track. All in all I’m very happy that I found my groove this week and it was all thanks to the pair programming sessions!

This week I worked on the SDL2 wrapper class and render loop code for our emulator. I also fixed a minor type error bug. The team met on Monday and we were very happy with the progress made that has been spearheaded by Josh’s design and Kim’s attentiveness. We have a lot of opcodes to get through and I plan on spending a long time that I have available tomorrow on diving into the code base and coming out with any recommendations we might need in our design before we move forward with adapting a more complex gui.

While the GUI is currently just a window drawn to the screen, I want to add some basic toolbar functionality if possible. I do not want to prioritize this at the moment, however, as the opcodes are much more important and I do not want to derail our progress as adding SDL2 to cmake was rough enough. Any additional external libraries for GUI functionality might cause unnecessary headaches at this point in time.

I came into this week a bit nervous about the upcoming demonstration assignment but now I feel a lot more confident both in my own abilities and the team. I am excited to get working this weekend and I hope to send quite a few pull requests before monday.