Box of Rats Blog

Ok, time to reflect on the past, review what has been done and where to go in the future.

Blog migrated to boxofrats.com

I have moved my blog to the boxofrats.com and am hosting it by myself now. I made the decision in order to have a little more flexibility and to have everything under one main domain name, but am aware that the maintenance responsibilities are now on me. If I would not have had various reasons to migrate, I simply would have stayed there, WordPress.com is a great hoster.

I should mention that I undertook one fruitless attempt to migrate to a Tumblr blog – I gave up after I found out that this is a totally different world.

Second Revision of ZMPP in the Works

ZMPP will stay as my main project – as a consequence, I am now writing a Glulx VM and a Glk library. A couple of games already work pretty well, there is still quite a bit of work to do. There are also the improvements on the Z-Machine implementation that I want to do, among a couple of other ideas.

Scala is now  my main JVM language

I have given Java The Language the boot, but I still believe in Java The Platform and as “assembly code” for the JVM, as in Mahatma68k.

After tinkering with Clojure for a while, I have finally settled on Scala – my main focus is on virtual machines, where I feel much more comfortable using a statically typed language. It simply works for me. I wished it had as much tool support as Java, though.

DMPP – some time …

I still have the intention on continuing work on the Amiga emulation some time, but this will have to wait until ZMPP got to the point that I envision. Understanding how the Amiga works is one of the most fascinating topics for me, but for now, the pragmatist in me wins.