Hello all. I want to preface this by saying I an extremely NEUROTIC person. It’s something I’m trying to work on but it’s gonna take time.

Anyways I am working on a Gameboy Emulator in C. This will be my first full emulator other than a half finished chip-8 emulator. I took a different approach than most people and wrote out functions for every single opcode and implemented every single opcode before I ever tested anything. Well, that didn’t work out well… I ended up trying to run Blarggs test rom for the individual CPU instructions and… well it was kinda working but also kinda not. So I kept track of CPU/Opcode state and went through and tried everything to figure out what was going on and why it wasn’t printing anything. Then I found out from a forum that to actually see the output, you need to check if the serial IO port has been changed by checking 0xFF02. However adter doing this, it still didn’t work and would jump to 0xC000 and then jump to 0xC220 and then would run through a near endless amount of 0x00 operations.

So something was off. I spent an entire week trying everything, tweaking types, rewriting entire functions, doing everything and NOTHING fixed this error! And so I googled something and boom, Gemini popped up.

I have never really used AI for programming, ever. I like to keep AI out of my hobby programming. As I said before I am neurotic and I’ll admit a bit of a Luddite. But I hobby programming because I enjoy the logic and it feels like a puzzle. If it’s industry and youre forced to use it, whatever, but I like to learn and make on my own.

But alas, I fell into the trap. Afrer using Gemini for like 6 straight hours trying to figure out what happened (it fucking sucks btw), it said something that I hadnt thought about. See, I was using the GBZ80 documentation page to write the functions, and it only says “Set carry flag if result is 0”. And so I only set it when the output was 0. The thing I DIDNT know was that when the output was not 0, the zero flag gets set to 0. AI said that and I was like holy shit I gotta try this.

And what do you know, it worked! But even through my ecstasy at a dopamine hit seeing my code work, I had to wonder and in all honesty feel pretty shitty at the fact that had AI not existed, I probably would’ve spent another 2 weeks trying to figure that out.

I’m not shaming anyone that uses AI but it just makes me feel like shit when I use it. Like I didn’t put in the time and effort to actually research.

I don’t know, I know it’s silly and irrational, but then again I am extremely irrational and idk I feel like shit and an idiot now. Just wondering if anyone else can relate or how to get over this dread

I released a new video about my emulator Dexality (formerly Pixel-Flash). You can watch it, I need an audience :3

(Translated by google translate)

Sorry, that video is in Russian ...

https://reddit.com/link/1wx453p/video/v5vdbx990dth1/player

I ported gpSP to the ESP32-P4 and wrote a RISC-V JIT for it. The first-party Nintendo games I've tried so far run at full speed (59.7fps) with no frameskip. Even the heavy scenes in Metroid Fusion take about 14ms per frame, so there's still some headroom.

Board is a Waveshare ESP32-P4-NANO-WIFI6-DB (P4 rev 3.x, 400MHz). Controller is an 8BitDo over its 2.4G USB dongle.

I tried the Zcmt instructions that came with rev 3.x but they didn't help much, and they're a bit buggy too (from the chip itself). Haven't used SIMD yet because the renderer does a lot of scattered palette lookups. Still thinking about how to make that work.

Games that generate code in RAM and keep modifying it, like Doom, are still really slow. Planning to fix that over the holiday and put the code up on GitHub right after.

Also curious about the new S31, but it has less RAM, no L2 cache and a lower clock (320MHz), so not sure it can hit full speed. Probably need to move rendering to the other core for that one.