Thursday 24 February 2022

Galaxian Part Nothing - The Holy Grail

The last correspondence I got from Miro was probably not long after my last post in September. It seemed to me he was approaching this project from a different angle and I couldn't really reconcile what I was doing with what he was doing. This is not a criticism in any way, shape or form, and I might also be completely wrong, but my original plan of working lock-step wasn't panning out.

With the distractions of everything else in life, I drifted away from the project and here we are some 5 months later and in that time I can honestly say I haven't even thought about Galaxian, let alone worked on it. I'm only posting now because I'm assisting someone else working on porting one of my earlier projects to another - proprietary - platform and I inadventently found myself back on this blog tonight.

I hope that Miro is progressing well and can finish his project, if he hasn't done so already!

So yet again I find myself with a slew of abandoned projects, some all-but-finished, and a blog to update.

Truthfully, I find Real Life is taking priority over my retro projects. Having young kids will do that to you. In recent years I picked up a few more hobbies and interests, mostly involving the kids or at least inspired by the kids, and retro gaming has become more about (occasionally) collecting and playing than reverse engineering and developing.

So what now?

Current projects aside, I've had a list of future projects and then there's that one "Holy Grail" project that is perhaps a little more ambitious than any of my previous projects. For years I've been using that as the carrot to motivate me to clear the backlog of projects (by completing them) before starting on it. Clearly it hasn't worked.

And then I start to wonder whether I'll ever get around to it. Or worse - someone else beats me to it. I've been there before a few times, and it really sucks the motivation out of you. I also see more and more technically impressive projects being released that I thought impossible back when I was more actively developing hardware and software. The project I have in mind is certainly nowhere near as technically challenging as what I see coming out now, so there's really no reason to put it off. I think I've learned enough about the process itself and starting to feel that it's "now or never" for me.

So maybe I'll just grit my teeth and start on my "Holy Grail" project. Maybe.

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