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2023-01-23
I'll try my best to do weekly updates. I know how these things go, but I'm going to try. Updates may not be at the beginning of the week all the time though.
I needed to know if someone else was attempting to write a fantasy core on the Pocket. So I decided to ask the internet and I think I may have gotten more than I bargained for:
I think the main takeaway ideas are:
1. I definitely needs to do this 😂.
2. No one else seems to be doing this.
First, of course, I needed to order a Pocket. Those things are in short supplies so, just like the Playdate, you end up on a waiting list of some sort. I'm currently in group C (182XXX) which is slated for, hopefully, sometime this year. Given that they just shipped 129xxx I've got a while to go. In the Playdate's case I ended up getting one on eBay so I don't know how patient I'm going to be this time around.
Second, I needed to define some basic guidelines for what Project Freedom's goals are:
That last part may be controversial. I've dabbled in so many other languages over the years and when the Playdate came out the first thing I saw was people asking if they could use C++, Rust, etc... It's just personal preference for me. I want this to be simple and fun. I find C++ to be just a bloated mess that produces bloated code (if you don't know what you're doing) and feel the syntax has become a joke over the years too. Rust may be cool but I also don't like the syntax which seems antiquated to me.
I've been doing some C again when I got into Playdate development and it's super refreshing to get back to a simple, small language even with all its downsides compared to some modern languages.
Python is the perfect language as far as I'm concerned. Small. Simple. Powerful. Cross Platform. It's perfect for tools.
So given all that, and since there is so much to do, where do I start?
It's really daunting to start developing each parts separately in the hope that someday they will connect and everything will work. So instead, I'm going to use the tracing bullet technique. The goal is to connect both ends of the problem, on one side user-code written for the console and on the other the screen where the graphics are displayed, right off the bat so that you have something working right away. You can then build on this, keeping everything working at all times.
Furthermore, since I don't have a Pocket in hand and I know nothing about FPGA right now, I decided to start off by writing a Simulator for the console. This will give me something to write the SDK on, test some designs (written in code) for the GPU and will eventually be useful for developing on the console anyway. I think it needs to be eventually multi-platform but I really want to shield myself from get into cross-platform development as much as possible so I decided to base it on [libSDL](https://www.libsdl.org). It's in C. It's GPL compatible and it will pretty much cover everything I need: graphics, sound and controllers. Bonus is, it wil be easy to build the simulator for other Apple devices like iPhone, iPad or Apple TV which could be fun.
I chose to develop that part of the project using Xcode instead of some custom IDE combined with Make or CMake. I miss working on a pure XCode project and I don't want to spend too much time emulating what Xcode does with my own environment. I've done that before for things like notarizing apps and it's not fun. You end up fighting against the platform instead of working with it. Other platform will just have their own projects that will be maintained in parallel. Not a huge deal.
So in no time at all, I got this up and running:
It's just a simple XCode project, launching SDL which opens a window. Nothing fancy but there you have my tracing bullet. This is all the framework I need to start building on, adding the two side: One that runs code written for the console and the other runs the code simulating the console and its various parts.
If you want to follow along, the repo for pfSimulator can be found below. This week's progress is at commit 242d97f8.
With ❤️ from Paris, France.
