OSU Capstone Blog Post 8

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.

Capstone Emulator Project Update 6

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!

Capstone Emulator Project Update 5

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.

Capstone Emulator Project Update 4

I think the team is making good progress. I was happy to go over everyone’s take on the disassembler and I think Josh did a great job on giving us a base to work with. He also went the extra mile with the class definitions and UML graphs which was very helpful. We ran into a few issues with the github actions linter causing a but of a delay but I think in general we are still on the right track. The team seems to be good with communication all around and I’m encouraged that we will put out great work.

I think one thing I felt like I was missing this week was a specific task to complete other than the disassembler and code review. I think I will try to take more initiative about what I intend to do. This should help us all get more work done and it will help me feel like we are making progress knowing that action items are getting completed. All in all, it was a good week but I personally want to take more initiative to get more code pushed to the repo.

Capstone Emulator Project Update 3

This week has gone well. The team has made great progress in getting organized. We have had 3 meetings and the last one was particularly well structured thanks our members taking initiative. We mainly went over the content of our project plan. I was responsible for the program structure and I was happy to have received good feedback on that. Everyone did great work so even after carefully going through great section we found little to add or change from what we had which is always a good sign. The diagrams and charts were on point and we concluded the meeting after turning it in.

The next task is to finish the disassembler. Each member will be implementing their version of it. The standup meeting posts revealed that we are all more a less bit rusty when it comes to programming so I think having everyone kind of dive-in in their own way will be very valuable to getting us all in the zone again. Programming is a bit like riding a bike in my experience. There’s a certain muscle memory aspect to it that’s hard to describe since it’s certainly not about the typing. I guess it’s a bit like math exercises in a sense. Anyways, I’m confident that by the next meeting we will all be a little bit more practiced and have a lot of insights to share with each other.

After that I think I will do a deep dive into the i8080’s manual and opcodes. I also plan on taking a good look at how two of my previous personal projects implemented their gameloop algorithms. While an emulator isn’t a game, the a gameloop algorithm made for 60fps will be valuable in implementing a 60hz space invaders emulator. I know that I had iterated on it twice so I look forward to reviewing the differences and taking those learnings into the new emulator as appropriate for the context.

Space Invaders Emulator Week 2

There has been good progress from a conceptual understanding standpoint with this project. I am very excited to work on an emulation. Our team has gone over the resources provided with the project description and have compiled the assets needed to begin develop the Space Invaders emulator. I was able to read through the emulator101 guide and use it to springboard onto other great resources for Intel 8080 emulation.

One particular recommendation I made to the team was the we proceed with the SDL2 graphics library for graphics. This is a very popular library in the emulation community that I had success using in my CHIP-8 emulator personal project from last year. Our teams seems very organized and we have had 2 meetings so far. While emulation can be a daunting task conceptually it seems we are all on the same page when it comes to taking it one bite at a time. I am very happy with the team so far and I think we will create a wonderful project.

I volunteered to give the architectural outline and overview for how I see our code being organized in our project plan. I feel that although the i8080 is quite a step up from the pseudo-chip that was CHIP-8, that my experience will prove to be valuable to the team. I remember how I structured the code and what a massive task it seemed at the beginning but I think it’s important to have a well thought out idea for how the design will be from the beginning. Good planning can go a long way to limit the code wrangling that can come up in the middle of the quarter. All in all I am very satisfied with how things are going and I look forward to giving a more exciting blog post next week once we begin working on the disassembler.

Capstone Introduction

An introduction to myself and the blog

Greetings. My name is Gregory Stula and I’m excited to start the final class in the OSU CS Post Bacc program and finish my degree. I have been in the program on and off for a while but most recently started with a commitment to finish around 2019. I have learned quite a bit in this program and I am very thankful for the staff at OSU for making it so great. There have been a few moments in my life when I had nothing to do but these courses and they definitely kept me busy. I love programming and it has always been nice to keep touch with the OSU CS community and have like minded people around to work and communicate with. While I am excited to work on this final project I will be a little sad closing this chapter in my life. However, all good things must come to an end and I am positive that this degree will open many doors for me. I am proud to have worked on this CS degree and OSU I can definitely recommend this program to others.

I am currently looking for work but I have worked in various Data positions at different companies including Uber. I really want to break through as a software engineer as that is where my true enjoyment of work lies. I really enjoy problem solving in this space. I find satisfaction solving problems both big and small. As long as I can write code, I don’t mind the task. I am really excited to work with my teammates this quarter and I look forward to working diligently and cooperatively.

My best programming language is C++. I applied for a C/C++ project that I really hope I get to work on this quarter. It would be a very nice summary of everything I’ve learned through this program and would be a most satisfactory way to sign off before graduation. If I do not get it, however, I won’t be upset. There are other projects that seem like they would be just as fun. Again, as long as I can write code I will be happy to solve problems and fix bugs.

I look forward to documenting my journey in this blog. I’ve never actually used wordpress to blog before so maybe I will learn something new and find a new outlet to express myself. I hope to make this blog look a lot nicer over time but for now I will stick with the defaults, more or less. Thank you for reading and wish my luck on my final step in my OSU journey.