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CHD stands for “Compressed Hunks of Data” and is developed as part of the tools for MAME. It is an awesome format for storing your game ROMs and keeping the size in control, in this post we explore this format and my success in using it across variety of emulators. Installing chdman The tool used to create and work with chd files is known as chdman and is a part of the MAME tools....

One of the libraries I would like to work with is the GTK toolkit, in order to develop some applications for Linux. One important aspect when it comes to GUI programming is multi-threading, I have rarely had to work with threads as I was mostly a JavaScript developer but this needs to change in the GUI world, as there is usually a central event loop constantly needing to process events, even if your app is doing nothing it’s actually doing a lot, it needs to keep processing window events and such, make a mistake and your app lags and maybe even the operating system will start warning that the app is not responding and may need to be force closed....

I’ve always been interested in emulators and writing an emulator has been in my bucket list for a long time. I think they are a great exercise and the experience you get from them is invaluable. Introduction to CHIP-8 So I decided to write an “emulator” for CHIP-8 programs. In fact it should be called an “interpreter” because the CHIP-8 was never actually a real hardware, it was more like a small programming language for creating games that some old PCs supported running....

Lua is a really simple programming language focused on portability and being able to be embedded, so chances are you won’t be using lua directly but as a part of a bigger program that embeds lua and allows you to use it to interface with the program. Lua is really easy to learn, especially if you already have a programming background which I assume you do in this post as I will just explain how lua does it differently....

I’ve always been interested in OpenGL and I finally gave it a try. OpenGL stands for “Open Graphics Library” it is basically a specification for a bunch of methods that GPU Providers implement, so it is tied to your graphics card. Because of that, the hardware and the OpenGL version you target is important. Prior to this I’ve had very basic experience with libGDX, a Java game engine which I tried to use it on Android....

I’ve recently found about gperf a GNU tool said to be a “a perfect hash function generator” Well what do we use it for? Anytime you need to lookup a string from a fixed dataset. It generates a “perfect” hash function that promises to do that lookup using at most one string comparison. A good use of it is in lexers (or call it a scanner or tokenizer if you want) where we need to distinguish keywords from identifiers, this leads us to scanning an identifier and before calling it an identifier we do comparisons to see if it could actually be a reserved/builtin keyword of the language....

I’m a bit dedicated to getting libGDX fully usable on Android that I created the template libgdx-termux it can use libGDX and build .apk files, all using only Termux. I’m still continuing to bring more functionalities to make game development complete on Android. And for today I bring you fbx-conv which is a converter utility by the libGDX team to convert 3D models into a more runtime-friendly format optimized for libGDX....

In the past I had my little hastebin clone with ExpressJS and MongoDB on my personal web server. I had since then moved to Vercel because my website is mostly static and I didn’t need a full web server on a VPS. I missed my hastebin clone so I wanted to recreate it, luckily Vercel supports serverless functions which allows us to do some server side stuff. Demo Here’s a demo URL to show you the final product: ravener....

I’ve decided to switch my website to the amazing hugo static site generator and in this post I’ll explain the reason and my experience with hugo in general. What did I use before? My website was built with plain HTML using bulma CSS Plain HTML might sound tough to maintain but I actually also wrote my own script to generate the output, this allowed to add extremely basic templating so I didn’t have to keep repeating code in every page....