|
|
|
|
|
|
by NobodyNada
2089 days ago
|
|
|
When I was 12 or so, I was fascinated by a video [0] visualizing the memory architecture of the Nintendo Entertainment System. I started researching the technical details of the console in order to try to make sense of what I was watching, and within a few hours I had decided to try to write a NES emulator. Now, the NES emulation scene is extremely mature, and so I quickly came across a number of warnings essentially saying "the world has too may NES emulators, please don't write another one." I decided to go ahead anyway, and after spending about 2 years' worth of afternoons and weekends, the result was just another bad emulator. It was slow, buggy, incomplete, and the code was a mess. By your standards, I wasted 2 years of my life making "yet another toy" emulator instead of "using [my] capabilities for a more useful goal." But I had a ton of fun, and the learning experience was absolutely invaluable. I learned in depth how a computer actually works at the hardware level (even though the NES is much simpler than a modern computer, the concepts and skills transferred over very quickly). As a result, my practical programming knowledge today is vastly improved over where it would have been had I not "wasted" all those afternoons. Many of the career opportunities available to me so far have been directly attributable to the skills I gained working on that emulator. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI3xZAn7r2A |
|
|