Happy (belated) New Year

I forgot to post during January. O well.

I refactored my notes webpage as well as spun of these ramblings into their own separate website.

I brushed off my old GBA and GameTank Verilog repositories and made some good progress on them.

For the GameTank, I hooked up the M6502 CPU with the rest of the system and got the basic write back loop working. I now need to finish designing and implementing my UART debugger so that I can probe the system during runtime.

For the GBA emulator, I had Claude finish implementing the THUMB and ARM opcodes. This was the task that caused me to drop the project originally, since the task amounts to just being really anal about following the spec and writing tests for everything.

This is a good use case for AI:

• writing the CPU is not my main concern
• plenty of other people have done it
• there is a golden standard with the ARM CPU manual and there is a fast feedback loop.

I also started reworking the memory architecture of the project. I was doing some very silly nested if/else chain through classes. I rewrote things to use page tables instead for a coarse pass through the address, and then finer grain control for addresses with custom rules. I'm now working on a scheduler so that the CPU can run uninterrupted until some event happens.

Still reading Baumann. I'm at Section where we talk about linear perturbations from the initial conditions of the early universe and how those generate the cosmic web. I'd ideally like to finish this before summer starts.

I got my GrayScott simulation to work with WASM (see here). It's not perfect, but in works on Chrome in mobile which is good enough for me! I learned about shaders and GPUs from this, which was neat!