Things are getting interesting

If there is a CPU, then there shall be an assembler, and today that also started ticking at last. Things now are really getting interesting fast after long months of hacking code without much visible results!

So the project goes on, slowly, as allowed by my job, gets together, and actually starts to show signs of life. Since I don't much develop incrementally, rather attempt to take everything at once, even though as of now I just have the capability to create some simple assembly program and run it on my emulator, things will likely escalate rather fast. After all, all I have between myself and a working game console right now practically is just a swarm of bugs to stomp out.

Just what my goals are with this? First and all, it will be open, open as in the sense of GPL (GNU General Public License). It is not just some emulator and stuff hacked together in a "garage", the more important part is that it has a strong specification, which will make the most important part of this system, also open by the definition of GPL. To be honest I have plans with it on the "closed" side as well as copyright holder. Openness as in GPL means anything you do on it will have to be GPL'ed, so to actually sell stuff, one would need special alternate licenses. But that's still a story yet to be written, and I not even intend to write it all myself.

For now the more important part is that as I perceive it, things go according to the schedule I set up, which schedule sets the release date for the next phase of public testing and finalizing to the middle of March. Hopefully this deadline can be met. At least assuming I can keep my employee staying at least somewhere near the weekly work time set in my contract.

(A day later) Working on a compiler from one point of view might seem funny. At least for me it is a bit strange that I type up some assembly program, see a compilation error, and I don't go fixing my assembly, rather start poking around in the compiler's guts to see what again went wrong. Now it can compile basic operations, and the second pass, the substitution of symbols also seem to work right, so things are on the move.