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SweetNES (pronounced “sweetness”) is my new pet project. It is an 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System® emulator. Ya, the old one from 1985. For some reason I’ve always enjoyed that original Nintendo. Call it nostalgia, but there was something so entertaining about those first games that I still find many of them just as enjoyable to play now as I did then.

I’ve been throwing around the idea of writing my own emulator for some time now. As far back as two years. A question that I’ve asked myself many times and that readers may be asking now is “Why make another emulator when there are already so many available?” I assure you it’s not because I have an ego and think that I can do it better than anyone else has ever done. In fact I usually work on projects that teach me new skills and that’s a primary reason I’ve decided on this project. I’ve always found the principles of emulation fascinating. I’m comfortable with the fact that SweetNES may never gain widespread popularity.

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I just read that Microsoft intents to release most of the .NET Framework as open source. The complete text of the article can be found at the link below. This would be fantastic! It would also make my .NET debugger project Clutch almost worthless. One of the big goals I had for Clutch was to be able to debug IL, or at least a decompiled representation of IL. The intention was to allow debugging of not only personal code but also the ability to drill right into the base class libraries and windows forms code. Microsoft’s announcement makes it sound like they’ll also be shipping .PDB files with debugging information and symbols. While this is great news, it also means that I’m officially shelving my Clutch project for the time being.

Resources:

• open.NET? Microsoft To Make .NET Libraries Available Under “Open Source”

Update [11/5/2007]: As it was pointed out to me, Microsoft will not be looking for community contributions and so the term “open source” is a bit misleading. At this point they only intend to make the source code available for viewing and debugging purposes and all future development will still be handled by Microsoft.

Remind me never to write a technical book, because the amount of time and energy necessary for me to write a single technical article is tremendous. At the pace at which I work it would easily take me ten years to finish. My newest foray into the world of publications is an article entitled Generic Gap Buffer. This one deals more in the realm of computer science than anything else I’ve written recently. I won’t spoil it for you and suggest that you just take a look for yourself.

Resources:

• Generic Gap Buffer Article on CodeProject

I frequently bounce between Firefox (my preferred browser) and IE7 (which I use for work and other purposes) and I used to get very frustrated that when I would bookmark a page I couldn’t seem to remember which browser I bookmarked it in. I used to try and synchronize the bookmarks/favorites between the two programs but that got laborious and cumbersome until I found the PlainOldFavorites Firefox add-on. It places the standard Favorites menu common to IE and Windows in the Firefox menu making it a breeze to use bookmarks across browsers. Of course that means I’m not able to use the more advanced bookmarking that Firefox offers but it does keep things simple.

Resources:

• PlainOldFavorites Mozilla Firefox Extension