Hi!

I’ve been working on a Game Boy game off-and-on for the last few months (hopefully more details about this soon!). Up until recently I was building the game with GNU Make, but I was frustrated with configuring Make’s prerequisites for accurate dependency tracking. Often I’d change a file included by my target, but Make wasn’t rebuilding appropriately.

I started looking at other build systems to solve this problem. I really liked how approachable Meson’s build rules where, and also that it supported projects composed of multiple languages. This is useful to me as parts of my toolchain for handling assets, and converting them to a format usable on the Game Boy, are written in higher level languages. If I change the code of part of that toolchain, the build system knows what assets need to processed and what parts of the game need to be relinked, automatically.

Portage is Gentoo’s source-based package manager, commonly invoked with the emerge tool. The Prefix project allows it to be used by users of other distributions and Unix-like operating systems in a “virtualenv”-type fashion. In Portage, packages are described in ebuilds, which are composed of shell functions understandable by many Linux users. This makes it a good fit for sharing packages across distributions and users working on a project.

Recently I picked up a box of early 1990s Garmin GPS receivers along with an array of accessories. I cleaned up one receiver, a GPS 95, installed 4 new AA batteries, and positioned it with a clear view of the sky. After an agonizing long time searching for satellites it eventually received a full almanac and made a GPS lock. It was pretty cool that it still works!