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What programming/technical projects have you been working on?
This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?
The only work that I can discuss publicly at the moment is that I'm fixing a bunch of bugs in the Tailscale client for Windows concerning how it handles DNS.
I got an Arduboy FX a little while ago and finally got around to making my first game for it--a clone of the old Drug Wars game for TI calculators. The version at that link is a re-skinned version without all the drug and shooting-cops references which weren't really appropriate for the Arduboy forums. The way I did that was basically wrote a big shell script that copies all the source code, processes it through about 50 lines of
sedregex replacements, then re-compiles it. I thought it was funny because I can't even count all the times I've sarcastically said "just do a find and replace" as a joke to trivialize how hard it typically is to make sweeping changes to code like that, and then the first time I actually did that it worked like a charm and saved a ton of work. I guess it helps that the game is so small.It's the first time I've written any C/C++ in probably 20 years, and having worked mostly in C# and Typescript for a long time, it was a stark reminder of how cushy we have it with programming languages nowadays, especially around string management and manipulation. Writing games within the memory and screen real-estate restrictions of a device like the Arduboy is a lot of fun, so I'll probably do more down the road when inspiration strikes me. A lot of the other community-made games are pretty great too, so the Arduboy's been pretty much my primary gaming device for several weeks now.
Never heard of the Arduboy before, but that’s a really neat little device! Some of the featured games look great too. I’m currently on my iPad, which doesn’t handle the emulator very well so I can’t check your clone out, but even just the mention of Drug Wars brings back good memories of secretly playing it while slacking in math class. ;)
The next step in my accordion controller project is to hook up the bass buttons. I made circuit boards for this two years ago but never built a case for them. Building a frame was much easier now that I have a 3D printer. Now I'm working on the actual buttons.
Recently, I've been developing a little format to write journals in HTML: HTML Journal. I've also created The Neon Kiosk, an HTML Journal aggregator. Hope you like it!