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Showing posts from February, 2019

GRG16: Mega-Drive-a-like

I was musing about the possibility of getting students to write console homebrew software.  I suspect students would find the prospect of running their own games on emulators (or perhaps even an actual software-hacked console) really inspiring and enjoyable. However, the technological difference between making homebrew software and downloading and running copyrighted ROMs is incredibly small.  So I suspect students' parents might be a bit suspicious or potentially even outright hostile to such a club. So I started to dig down to what the educational benefit of such a thing would be.  Potental benefits might include: understanding/using indexed-colour images, managing RAM and VRAM by hand, writing programs in assembler (or a subset of C), understanding specific technical limitations.  In short: lots of great scope for computational thinking and exposing technical systems as not-actually-magic. Pico-8 is amazing and YOU SHOULD BUY IT.  I love it and it is v...