October recap

It has been a month since my last update.
I'd like to say I have been working very hard but I've basically just slacked off for four weeks, and this is the result of that pause from programming. Said pause was also starkly forced by schoolwork, which took some of my time and energy.

TEC30

Tec30 development stopped. I was very hesitant to share the SDCC backend, and I was also working on the Wishbone module but just sort of lost motivation. At least I have reached somewhat of a minimum viable product with the processor so I don't feel guilty for this sort of pause. I had to finish writing the docs but I have absolutely got no motivation to do so, I might ask deepseek for help although I care about documentation being human written. We'll see.

Bad Apple!! on the C preprocessor

There's a rule, or saying, I don't quite know: "if it can display two colors, it can run bad apple". Turns out CPP can do that. First, I created a python script to turn the original video in a specially devised format consisting of about 300000 lines of #ifdef directives. Then I creates a much smaller header file to decode said format, essentially creating a super tiny VM whose "ISA" consists of "W(n)" and "B(n)" directives, where W and B are for white and black respectively, and n is the number of pixels to draw. This was fun but the pure, CPP decoded video runs at like 2-3fps. To make it actually run at 30fps I created an "impure" version which is implemented as an actual C program instead of leveraging the poor C preprocessor, and this version runs beautifully at 30fps. You can try both out by cloning the source, which is on my github. No preprocessor was harmed in the making of this project.