path: root/2020/subtitles/emacsconf-2020--27-state-of-retro-gaming-in-emacs-chip8--vasilij-wasamasa-schneidermann-autogen.sbv

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hello everyone and welcome to my talk

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state of retrogaming and emacs

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[Music]

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first of all a little bit about myself

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my name is neilman i'm 28 years old

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i work as a cyber security consultant

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msg systems and

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test other people's web applications and

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review the source code for security

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problems

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you can reach me by email i have my own

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self-hosted git repositories

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and i have a blog where you can

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occasionally find new posts by me on all

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kinds of things not just emix things

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so but the motivation about this one i

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found that emacs is the ultimate

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procrastination machine and there are

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lots of fun demonstrations i'll go over

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a few of them

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for example someone made a thing to

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order sell it for himself online so it

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doesn't have to walk over to the shop

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there's plenty rc bots there's some game

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things

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there's an emulator for the z machine

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which you can use to play zorg

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and so i asked myself at this point can

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you actually emulate retro games at

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60fps and it looked around a bit

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and found some projects but none that

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were actually able to

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do it at 60fps so i set out to do my own

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one

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and looked out for a console that you

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can actually emulate at that speed

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using emax with its very very limited

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rendering

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[Music]

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and here's the project chip8.el it's

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pretty much finished

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it clocks into under 1000 sourced lines

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of code

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it supports the superchip 8 extensions

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it runs at full speed all games behave

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okay as far as i'm concerned and

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yeah i'm pretty happy with it it's very

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much the hell world of emulation

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and i might maybe do some other

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emulation projects in the future

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now for the section which is the longest

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bunch of fun facts about ship a dot el

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which i've learned

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during this project so

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what the hell is debate anyway first of

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all unlike many other emulation game

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things it's not a console but a vm

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it was designed for easy parting of home

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computer games

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it wasn't terribly successful and but

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there's still a small community of

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enthusiasts

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writing games for it and there are even

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a few demos

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this vm has system specs it has a very

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very simple 8-bit cpu with 16 registers

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and

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36 fixed size instructions you have a

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whole

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4 kilobyte of ram you have a stack with

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16 return addresses

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the resolution is 64 by 32 black white

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pixels

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rendering is done by drawing sprites

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these are drawn in excel mode meaning

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that if you

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draw a sprite and set a bit it just

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flips over from black to white or white

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to black

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first one you have a modern buzz that

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can just beep at one

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frequency and most unusually there's a

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hexadecimal keypad as input

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so the keys are basically zero to nine

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and a to f

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so how does this whole thing work it

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runs an unspecified speed

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you'll probably have to do some fine

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tune you find the speed you're happy

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with

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sound and delay timers exist they count

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down at 60fps down to zero

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this is done so that you can play a

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sound at some specific time

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the game itself is loaded with a fixed

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offset into ram the program account is

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set to exactly that offset

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and from there it enters the game loop

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where decodes and instruction executes

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it for the side effects and just

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loops and does this at infinitum

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[Music]

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so the game was the first thing where

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into problems the usual game approach is

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to

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do stuff figure out how long to eight

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wait for exactly that much and

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repeat this doesn't work well in imax at

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all because well

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user input basically and

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emacs is designed to just do whatever it

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needs to do whenever you enter use input

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instead of

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doing things at one specific time if you

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try to do

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interruptable sleep well you get

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unpredictable behavior

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for example can be the timer doesn't run

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at all at next time because you've

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accidentally cancelled it

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if you do uninterruptable sleep it's

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freezes instead which isn't what you

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want either

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so i went for timers which forced me to

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do inversion of control

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meaning that i have to write code in the

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style where it's just call it

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time and this allows this input to

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happen and to

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for things to progress at roughly the

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speed i want to

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so there's the skydiver function which

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is called a 60fps

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and i have to be very careful to not do

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too much in it

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and say this function execute cpu cycles

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decrypt the sound delay registers and

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redraw

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the screen so to map this whole system

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to mx lisp

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i've used just integers and vectors

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which contain even more integers

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this is used for the ram registers

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return stack key state screen and so on

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and so forth basically

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what you would do if you were writing c

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all of this is stored in global

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variables i'm not using any

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lists at all and as a side effect

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there's no constant going on at all

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there are no extra objects created which

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would trigger

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garbage collection pulses this getting

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this red was rather tricky actually and

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there were some

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in garbage collection problems which i

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had to resolve over time

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so the coding instructions for this you

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have to know that all instructions are

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two bytes long

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and the arguments encoded inside them

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for example the jump to address

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instruction

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is encoded as one and three hex digits

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the type is extracted masking with f000

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and then shifting it by 12 bits mask

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means the hd

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performance binary end you can do the

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same with the argument basement with

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zero fff

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and no shift if you do this long enough

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you'll find common patterns for example

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addresses are always encoded like this

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using the last three nibbles in the code

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you'll find a big count which dispatches

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on the type and executes it for the side

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effects

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[Music]

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for testing i've initially just accused

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the rom until i fit ctrl g

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and then use the debug command to run

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the screen to a buffer

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later on i found tiny roms that just

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display a static

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test screen for example logo and looked

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whether it looked right

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i added instructions as needed and went

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through more and more and more roms and

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later i wrote in unit test suite as a

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safety net and this unit test suite it

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just

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sets up an empty emulator state executes

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some instructions and then looks whether

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the

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expected side effects have happened

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for debugging i usually use e-debug but

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this was super ineffective because well

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you don't really want to step through

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big cons doing side effects for every

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single cycle when it can take like 100

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cycles for things to happen

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therefore i've set up logging and

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whenever i locked something

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and couldn't figure out the error i

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compared my lock output with

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instrumented version of another emulator

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and if the locks diverge then i have

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figured out where the bug lies and could

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look deeper into it

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future project idea might be a chip 8

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debugger but i doubt i'll ever

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go into it for analysis i initially

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wrote a disassembler which is a very

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simple thing but super tedious

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especially if you wanted to add advanced

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functionality for example analysis or

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thinking of what part is data what had

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this code

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and i had this great idea for using the

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radari 2 framework

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and adding analysis and disassembly

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plug-in for it

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so i looked into this found okay here

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where you can write plugins in c

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but also in python so i wrote one in

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python and then the scout there's

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actually existing one in core which you

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have to enable explicitly by passing its

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argument so i've tried it and found it's

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not exactly as good as my own one so

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improved this one and submitted pull

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requests until it was at the same level

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[Music]

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rendering was the trickiest part of this

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whole thing because

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well i decided against using a library

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not like there would have been any

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usable library for this

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my usual approach of accelerating svg

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file was too expensive it just created

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too much garbage and took too long time

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i then tried creating mutating strings

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this was either either too expensive

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just like svgs or too complicated i

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tried changing svg tiles which created

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gaps between the lines

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then i tried to create an xpm file which

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was backed by a bull vector

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administrating this bull vector

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but the image caching effect made it

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just every nth frame to appear which

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wasn't good either then i had the idea

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to just use plain text

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and paint the individual characters with

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a different background color this

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this had perfect perfect performance

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there were many optimization attempts

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until i got there and it was

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very very stressful i wasn't sure

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whether i would ever get to accept the

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performance at all

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for sound you only need to a single beep

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so technically it shouldn't be difficult

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to emulate it

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however doing this is hard because emacs

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officially only supports synchronous

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playback of sounds

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but there's also emax process which you

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can launch in asynchronous way

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so i looked into it and found that

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employee has a slave mode and mpv

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supports listing on the

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fifo for commands so i've created a pipe

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started a past mpv in loop mode and

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always send in pause and pause command

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to the fifo and that way i could control

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when to start beeping and stop beeping

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so yeah that's it so far was a very

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educational experience

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i have tried out a bunch of games which

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were

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well i almost say the worst ports of

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classic games i've ever tried

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it wasn't terribly fun to play them but

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was fun to improve the emulator until

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well things worked good enough

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and i've learned a lot about how

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computers work at this level

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so maybe maybe i'll in the future make

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another emulator

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but uh i'm not sure whether anything

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more advanced like intel 8080 emulator

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will actually run mix fast enough

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but it's still an interesting idea

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because then you could actually have an

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os

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inside emacs and fulfill that one

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specific meme

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but if i try to do most serious stuff

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i'll probably use chicken scheme which

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is my

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preferred language for serious projects

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and writing neso gamer emulator

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and that's it thank you