Category: Personal Project

In a few hours over a weekend, I developed a basic TicTacToe game for the Nintendo Switch. I made use of libnx as the base library, and then built on top of some of their examples.

To ease development, I made use of an emulator called Yuzu to do a lot of testing. However, at the time I made this, the emulator did not support touch screen input, so I did still require a fair amount of testing on real hardware as well.

As the base libnx library is relatively limited to just hardware functionality, I did have to build a fair amount of other useful things myself. One of these was the ability to read and display bitmap images, which I used for the player O and X icons. Without this, I would have been limited to only drawing individual pixels. While the images I used in the game were fairly basic, you can see on of my test images in the gallery which is a full 32bit bitmap with an alpha channel as well.

Check out the video to see the game in action on a real Nintendo Switch!

The code is also up on github: https://github.com/3Daniel/switch-oxo

 

In my spare time I have been slowly writing my own emulator for the original Nintendo GameBoy using C. I have been using this mostly as a learning exercise to understand various aspects of how CPUs and hardware work.

It has been quite a good project to start doing this sort of thing as the GameBoy hardware has been fairly well documented over the years. There are also a large number of emulators written by others that I have been using as reference for my own.

At this point in time I don’t have anything graphical working, only a start on the underlying cpu and memory structures. But I’m improving it over time and hope to eventually be able to actually play something on it.