So, I finally decided to start a personal blog. The main motivation being that I’d like to have a way (to force myself) to document the stuff and projects I do. My interests mainly revolve around assembly/machine code programming and old gaming hardware, my favorites being the SNES, Playstation, Sega Saturn.
My affection for console programming started the Christmas I got my PlayStation 2. If you live in the PAL region, you might remember the Demo CD that came bundled with it. On this CD, there was a version of the YABASIC interpreter. You could write simple BASIC code and run it on your PS2. I was completely blown away by this. I don’t remember if I got any games with it, but I do remember spending the first weeks with my PS2 “tipping” code into the simple editor with a controller(a controller!) and running it on the console.
I remember writing simple text adventures and attempting to write a snake clone. It never worked, but it was fun nonetheless. From that moment on, I was captured. Hardly a week goes by without me writing some assembly code for a console.
Sadly, most of my work is rather unorganized. So I started to use GitHub about a year ago. I started uploading my code and contribute to repositories. Most recently, I helped improve the language-65asm package for the Atom editor. This package provides syntax highlighting for several 6502/65816 assemblers. I’ve also written my own Atom grammar for 6809 assemblers. The Motorola 6809 was used in the Dragon 32/64 home computer and the Vectrex console. Two other machines I love coding for.
I hope to improve the quality of my work by exposing it to others and learn from them in return.
What will you find here? I will start my blog with a series of articles I have been working on for a while. These are a series of tutorials on how to write games for the SNES.
The other project I’m working on is an assembler written in Haskell for the SuperH 2 processor used in the Sega Saturn. The Saturn has a small but active homebrew scene. They have few good C compilers and the original assembler provided to developers at the time. But they lack some features I look for in an assembler, so I decided to start writing my own. I’ll document the progress in this blog so others may have a guide when attempting something like this of their own.
In the future, I plan to write articles on topics specific to assembly programming on older (gaming) hardware. The Vectrex is one console I’d really like to explore in more detail.
You can find me on tumblr too, where I post covers of old assembly programming books and content related to it. There I will also post updates about this blog. I do not use Twitter(I loath Twitter), but I might change my mind if this blog gains enough traction.
See you soon.