Coding holiday hack - 2023

This year over the holidays I am going to take on the idea of a holiday hack. Now if you haven’t heard of this before, a holiday hack is a time to work on a project or idea that is experimental in nature. This could be anything, maybe you have had an idea to create an application to track your cat’s day or you want to build that game idea that has been perculating in the back of your mind. They don’t have to be anything serious and it should be something you can do in a short amount of time.

Now with the brief idea out of the way let me discuss my plans for this year.

My Hack

So if you have followed any of the posts I have done over the years you would know that I love the idea of Retro gaming and preservation, so much so that I have started RetroCade and PlayCade projects.These projects have always been an evolving process. When the Cade idea started it was an experiment with Xamarin and C# to build a chip-8 emulator. This was successful. It evolved away from iterating in C# to Rust. With the current experimental chip-8 platform library being written as a Rust library.

However I have been keeping an eye on the Swift programming language for a while and after watching a talk by Miguel de Icaza on using Swift as the main language for Godot (talk is here) I have decided to try to language out by re-implementing the current chip-8 platform library in Swift.

Goals

With the idea set I have a couple of goals I want to hit with this hack. We will see how we go.

  • The library should match or succeed in passing the current tests being past by the rust version of the library
  • The library should be able to output to a MacOS application either via software rendering or GPU rendering
  • The Library should output sound

Now not all these will most likely be hit but we will see how far we get by the end of the holidays. I currently have a month off from work so I am giving myself until the 15 of January to complete this hack. I will provide an update that week on how I went.

If you would like to follow along on the hacks follow me on Threads as I will be posting my progress there.