august

back 2 skewl

justin scawful • 25 august 2020

i have officially begun my post-covid semester of online school. so far it hasn't been too bad. i'm taking calculus ii, biology ii, and engineering physics. not sure if i've mentioned that before on the blog but figured i'd list it anyway. so far i'm enjoying calculus a fair amount. i got a nice message from the professor about how i was progressing rapidly through the course and he asked me to look out for any potential issues with the homework assignments for other students. that was a pleasant surprise and made me feel good. i had to do my first video call meeting for physics and it wasn't nearly as bad as i had expected. i guess i didn't really think it would be awful but i was apprehensive to the idea. once it started i realized that we were all in this new environment together and i might as well roll with it. i like the mental challenge that the physics problems have given me and i think it will help with my game programming skills. i've struggled with understanding velocity and vectors when making games with SDL so this is exactly what i needed. biology it took me awhile to get started since i had to get the lab manual from the school bookstore and i wasn't able to get a time slot to come in until yesterday so i'm doing catch up work on that. i'm trying to be less cynical about biology than i was last semester so i can get a good grade.

learning assembly

justin scawful • 13 august 2020

so i just finally got power back after an insanely powerful windstorm swept through much of the midwest. winds were up to 100mph and it caused a lot of damage. i had a tree fall in my driveway as well as on a power line in my yard. we were out of power since monday when the storm hit and even my job was out of power. i walked around my neighborhood shortly after the main storm subsided and looked at all the damages. it was pretty insane to see. whole trees uprooted and tons of debris everywhere.

recently i've been leaning heavily into learning to program in assembly for the 65816. i want to take my rom hacking abilities to the next level and i know this is what's necessary to do so. i've been reading the western design center 65816 programming manual, watching the retro game mechanics explained series on snes features, and getting some basic code written myself. it's unlike any language i've tried to learn so far but it's really interesting. understanding the memory mapping of the super nintendo has been pretty important for me finally understanding what certain addresses were referring to when i performed hex edits or had things explained to me. i think being able to read this language will help me a lot with hyrule magic as well, since i'll be able to study the link to the past disassembly (and the leaked source code) and use that knowledge to help with the more low level things happening in hyrule magic. all the different addressing modes the 65816 supports is a lot of work and it's taken me awhile to wrap my head around them but i'm starting to get the idea. now i just need a tangible thing to program to help actually practice my abilities.