So it took a while, but I am finally now putting to paper my thoughts on my last Octo project which was an implementation of the sliding 15 puzzle.

The program turned out alright, but this will serve as a lesson to better plan my future projects. The main thing is I am not super into the 15 puzzle. It would have been better to do a project that I would actually have fun playing afterwards. My thinking had been that it would be a good stepping stone to a Connect 4 game, but I lost motivation and it sort of just dragged on.

In fact, I feel I got rather sidetracked working on the Chip-8 games. I had it in my head that I was going to make really awesome Chip-8 games (and maybe in the future I can still do that) but my original goal was simply to get a better understanding of Chip-8 to help with writing my own Chip-8 implementation.

Ultimately, if I want to delve into low level game programming, I’d probably be better off doing that on game boy or NES. Chip-8 is extremely limited. In fact, I found that John Earnest’s online Octo IDE that I had been using, was by default running programs at 20 cycles/frame, but my research tells me that original hardware would be closer to a running rate of 7 cycles/frame. In other words, as constrained as I felt, the Octo IDE was still giving me quite a bit of leeway.

On the actual programming side of things, it definitely pays off to plan out an Octo program. Since I had already done the snake game, I figured I would just start cranking out some code. The result was frequently needing to track down bugs where I had overwritten a value in a register that was used elsewhere in the program. Taking a month long break in the middle of the project didn’t help either. The process would have been a little smoother if I had taken the time to map out the registers and their uses.

I think I will now take a break from Chip-8 games and write up another Chip-8 interpreter. I’d like to do it in C, which I need to brush up on, and along the way I can also learn a bit of SDL. This should then set me up to be in a position where I can tackle a Space Invaders emulator next.