Alright, mad scientist time: you guys know about Zig? This language in interesting in itself and I recommend you check it out if you didn’t before, but for today we’re staying in magical C++ land. Got the idea from this blog post that I could use the Zig compiler as replacement for Clang, GCC and MSVC in my engine and stop having to use Visual Studio on windows. Sounds enticing, right?...
Thought it was a fun idea to implement a very basic emulator so I did just that! My CHIP-8 emu can run most vanilla ROMs without problems. It’s a simple 8bits computer with a rather reduced instruction set, so it wasn’t too much pain to get things going. I used the publicly available ROMs for testing as well as a bunch of custom unit tests. I have to say it was a fun little side projet, especially since I didn’t have to write any of the games for it, just load that ROM and here we go!...
Raytracers are one of those cool programs that you can write in a few hours and already have something fun to play with. I never got to write one at school so I figured I would spend a day or two and get one going! Because many other sources recommend it, I downloaded Peter Shirley’s book Ray tracing in one weekend and gave it a go. Even though I was familiar with the concepts, it was a good exercise and also surprisingly fun!...