Devlog #4: Stack Overflow

After finding that it works last devlog, it didn’t actually work, because all my other roms kept crashing with stack overflow error. I, of course, started searching for an infinite loop (as one does when confronted with a stack overflow), but this was my first EVER stack overflow without an infite loop. Just shouldn’t have put 32 KiB of ROM on the stack. For anyone wondering, the rom I showed used a variable length cartridge and was because of that already on the heap.

I also did some minor refactoring:

• The header utility has now its own crate
• I use anyhow for errors
• Removed tons of obsolete comments and prints
• Header details can now be printed to the console for debugging

Devlog #5: Final upload

After I finally finished uploading everything to the server and fetching all of the 22K products they have, I noticed that the page is kinda laggy if you try displaying all of them at once (who would have thought). So I implemented paging and downloaded everything AGAIN, because idk?. There is db persistence across builds, but I do it on startup anyways.

And all of that with 1s delay between requests to avoid getting rate-limited by their server. It took sooo long. Anyways, it is ready for shipping, I hope you enjoy it!

Devlog #4: Setting up a server

So for the last day or so I’ve been working on setting up an online server. Getting the OCI (Oracle) Free Tier account took forever and then actually aquiring a machine too; They’re always out of resources, unless you upgrade to pay as you go. The one hour logged here is mainly me creating new Dockerfiles, that don’t have any of the build tools in the live server. Idk what to show, here is some screenshot from the server I set up:

Devlog #3: The frontend

I restructured my project a bit, so I could have a simple web UI for my project. Nothing fancy yet, but it proofs that everything works. Still, quite interesting, since I have never used React before and I see why so many people like it (Also got a fair bit of help from AI with the design; that’s not really my cup of tea).

Since all of the base features are implemented now, I think I will ship it soon, but before that, I want to make a few more adjustments (to not get rate-limited) and polish the UI a bit. Below you see the first UI draft

Devlog #2: Data Expansion

After I got everything set up last devlog I now added some real data collection capabilities. We now track:

• name
• brand
• vendor
• price of one unit
• size of one unit (The thing in the image, not necessarily 1 kg/L/etc)
• image URL
• reference price (How much does 1 kg/L/etc cost?)
• tags like “organic”, “gluten-free”, etc

I also restructured some of the code to make it easier to add new vendors, befor we were kinda fixed on SPAR. That’s all for now, I will now go and create a frontend so that next time I can show you more than some db schema.

Deblog #1: New Project

The end goal is to have an app that can compare prices between different grocery stores and can tell you where you can get your items the cheapest. I have set up a basic project in Docker with Rust and Postgres. Current capabilities are loading product data from SPAR deserializing, structuring and storing it in the db. There is no UI yet, but thats the next step.

Devlog #3: I’m back

It’s been a while since my last devlog, I lost interest in this project and was off playing XCOM 2 again (such a good game!). The main reason why I lost motivation is that I spent forever trying to get it to display anything but a blank white screen. Now I wanted to write that I will keep trying, but when generating a image for the devlog it actually worked. I have honestly no idea what changed, but neither do I care. We are so back! Oh, also there is memory inspection for debugging now.

Devlog #2: MBCs and loading ROMs

I finished support for MBC1 and added automatic recognition of the MBC version when loading a ROM. Then I added GitHub Releases (in theory - there aren’t any actual releases yet), as always it was a chore and took way too long. I also added the little label you see in the screenshot to have something to show here.

Devlog #1: An introduction

Since I have started this project before Stardance there is quite a lot to tell: I implemented (almost) all of the cpu instructions, then I added memory, so it can actually run something. Then I added this wonderful UI you can see in the screenshot (my first UI that doesn’t completely suck, Yay!) and added some MBCs - needed to support different cartridges. The next goal is of course to get it to draw some things to the screen. Might have to screw around with GitHub Releases first though, setting that up is always such a pain.

Anyways, that’s it for now, next one will be a bit more detailed. Cheers!