Today is the last day of my week off. As usual I suffer from cognitive
dissonance as I always feel like I did not do anything I planned for these
couple of days.
Due to COVID I had to take one third of my vacation days till the end of June.
The management sensed that summer is coming and everyone is waiting for the
government to lift all the limitations and then take their vacations - most
employees at the same time probably. So as a countermeasure we were obliged to
take our vacation days "as usual".
My mind was full of plans, I wanted to
* learn Swift
* install Ubuntu Snappy Core on my RPi
* play Tomb Raider (the 2013 version)
* finish the 7th novel of King's Dark Tower series
* finish my C64 chargen viewer
* learn Japanese and Latin
* socialize a bit on irc and call my friends living in distant countries
So what did I accomplish? I finished The Dark Tower and now I am reading The
Wind Through the Keyhole. I also finished the chargen viewer. I was curious how
VIC bank switching works on the C64, so I switched it to bank 3 and copied the
chargen from ROM to RAM - chargen does not generate characters, it's only the
name of the area containing character shapes in ROM.
My little assembly program then takes each shape from the copy and shows it as
a 8x8 matrix built of differently colored spaces on the screen. You can
navigate up and down or jump right to a character index. It even has a real
size character preview. I used a sprite for that as the C64 can't display all
of the characters in the chargen at once as it has two modes:
uppercase/graphics and lowercase/uppercase. In uppercase/graphics mode it
cannot display lowercase characters for instance. I plan to add a rudimentary
editing mode to my program. Everything in assembly of course.
So that's it, I have not even played with Lara or call any friends... they did
not call me either...
Tomorrow is work time again. I wonder when we will be allowed to show up in the
office again. Working from home is nice, but I miss the atmosphere in the
office where I am surrounded by people working. Alone at home my motivation is
at rock bottom...
