Week 1 – Getting started.

The first week of GSoC was a slow one for me. I had my semester-end exams which kept me occupied for most of the week. So instead of starting with writing code I decided to instead spend time on some other things.

First was going through the Pro Git book for a better understanding of how git works and it helped me a lot. My previous knowledge of git was limited to a bunch of commands I picked up from here and there which meant I had no idea of what’s possible to do and what isn’t. I can now actually understand why things are the way they are and can do better than just copying commands from stackoverflow and hope that it works.

Second was to find some C64 games which are also supported by spatterlight for testing my implementation. Luckily there’s a set of game on ifarchive I can use. While I can’t run spatterlight myself because it’s only available for macs, I can look into the source code and sure enough those games are also supported by it.

I started working on adding these games to detection which is when I encountered a minor bug. The Scott engine has a list of supported games along with their filesizes and md5 hash. When adding a new game, the file is matched against this list but a wrong condition caused it to match with the first entry in the list with the same filesize. This wasn’t a problem till now because every supported game had a different file size but the C64 games happen to be of the same size. I fixed it and sure enough, the games are now detected properly.

Now that the games are detected and can be loaded, the next thing to work on is loading the game data and that’s what I am doing right now. It’s a bit involved and might be the hardest part of this task so I hope I can make some good progress in the coming week.