ITSSS Christmas TimeEeEeEeE!!! 🎁
Hellooo and welcome back to another post on this amazing blog that I definitely keep updating consistently, mhm.
Ok, but seriously, I want to give an update on what I have been doing and why I have not been putting as many posts as I would like to.
BUT FIRST!! With every Christmas, you know what comes as well? Advent of Code!!
Now for anyone that has not heard of Advent of Code (Or for those who just stambled upon this post and blog waves) Advent of Code is a yearly event where you are meant to solve certain coding problems for each day of December until Christmas!!
It is very incredible and fun, and I also mentioned it in previous years, like Its Christmas Time!! ☃️ and Merry Christmas Everyone! and even my first entry in New GUI on Website!
So if you want more context, I would suggest checking those posts out!!
This year, I wanted to try something new once again with a new programming language, and I decided to go with GO, also called Golang!
I decided to take a look and use Golang as one of my future projects, include working with something called Pretendo.
What is Pretendo?
Oh yes! Thank you, amazing person who asked that question. Pretendo is a project by some incredible people who work on rebuilding/reversing many games and Nintendo online services and servers that have long been shut down by Nintendo. Most of their servers are made in GO.
I really want to revive one of my favourite games on the Nintendo Wii U soon (Project comingTM), and I thought it would be a great idea to learn GO as well as do Advent of Code with it!!
Now, was it a good idea to learn a whole new language in the span of like uh… 10 minutes before the first Advent of Code challenge? Probably not… But it’s fineeeeee.
Also, as pointed out by the creator of Advent of Code, Eric Wastl, there was gonna be a change this year with changing the 24-day challenge to a 12-day challenge! Which was very interesting. I was not sure I would be able to get through all of them, but I also remembered the time when I managed to get up to day 15 on one of the years, so I was hopeful!!
This year I managed to get up toooooo… Day 5! 😅
I mean… This is where I am at the moment. I am planning to try to tackle more of them during the Christmas break, so we will see how that goes!!
If you are interested in checking out my solutions (For some reason… I don’t judge), you can check them out here!
Now we can move on to what else I have been up to recently!!
I last mentioned on my previous post (“I can make that“ - Wishlists) that I was in the middle of my exams, and I want to inform you (And my future self) that I managed to complete them all successfully!! 🎉
This allowed me to get an amazing place in university where I am in the process of studying Computer Science (One of my target courses) and I am actually so happy about it!!
This means that I will be able to learn more and make some more interesting projects in the future with some top notch quality (Hopefully)!!
I have also gotten into modding my Nintendo Wii U, as mentioned above, for a future project, but I also managed to port the one and only Celeste to the Wii U!!
Ok, yes, it is the PICO-8 version of Celeste, BUT STILLLL.
It is from a fork of lemon32767 which I managed to re-port to the Wii U with some nice tools like devkitppc
I managed to create this Docker-Compose yml file to make it easier to program and compile Homebrew for the Wii U!!
version: '3.8'
services:
devkitppc:
image: devkitpro/devkitppc:20250727
container_name: devkitppc
tty: true
volumes:
- ./src:/src
working_dir: /src
# Optionally, keep container alive (for VSCode attach):
command: sleep infinity
This basically creates a container with the devkitppc toolkit, which has all the required libraries and tools to compile for the Wii U and mounts everything so that I can remote into the container and program there!
Which is a technique I learned back when I was programming the Mnemosyne project, Making my first Amiga Application!.
I was also able to use some example repos like the wut which is an SDK for creating rpx and rpl files for the Wii U to launch and also includes some incredible examples with both C and CMake!
This was very interesting, especially when trying to figure out how to run some SDL2 applications, where I managed to find out that there exists a certain command called.
/opt/devkitpro/portlibs/wiiu/bin/powerpc-eabi-pkg-config, which can give you cflags and libs by providing it with the required library name!!
Like, for example, if we wanted SDL2, we could do:
/opt/devkitpro/portlibs/wiiu/bin/powerpc-eabi-pkg-config sdl2 --cflags
and
/opt/devkitpro/portlibs/wiiu/bin/powerpc-eabi-pkg-config sdl2 --libs
To get the required flags to compile with SDL2!!
So, using this, I was able to port the PICO-8 version of Celeste to the Wii U, which I am actually still working on to fix some issues with the aspect ratios!
In other news
The table has fallen… D:
I know, I know… it is really sad for us to finally say goodbye to the table…
For people who don’t know, “the table” was something I made on the very first posts on this blog, where it was a table that was made up of various languages and frameworks that I learned or worked with. (For more info, check out My Github Table)
The table was changed recently to a more minimalistic version until further notice, changing from this:
To this!
This categorises everything, which is also more “professional” looking, I guess?
But don’t worry, I have not forgotten about the table, and I am actively thinking of possible ways to bring it back. (Perhaps?)
Finally!
In our last news, what I have been doing is this specific Pull Request on the HypixelSkyblock Project by Swofty-Developments.
https://github.com/Swofty-Developments/HypixelSkyBlock/pull/545
What is HypixelSkyblock? What is this project?
Oh yes, sorry haha… HypixelSkyblock is an open source project that aims to recreate a famous game mode on the Hypixel Network called, well… Skyblock!
I personally, in the past, have spent a lot of my time playing Hypixel Skyblock, and when I saw the opportunity to contribute to such a nice project, I jumped right in!!
Firstly, I wanted to see how I could get it running, and so I went to the README and followed the instructions… Until… I realised that the instructions were like over 20 steps long and it was very hard to follow…
So I decided to help by creating a more automated way to get the project up and running by usingggg… Docker!!! Exactly, you know what this is, we are doing it againnn!!
Epic rock docker solo
I created a Docker-compose file and a Dockerfile, which essentially did all the steps outlined, but instead of a user having to do them all manually, they could just run the docker-compose up --build command to get everything up and running!!
Initially, I created a contribution with a basic version of this implementation, but managed to refine it more recently to be as pain-free as possible!!
This managed to change the setup process from over 20 steps to just 4 if users choose to use Docker!!
This was very exciting for me as I managed to help out, and I am able to now create more contributions in the future more easily with Docker, as I don’t need to worry about having everything set up and installed to test my changes!!
I highly recommend checking out the project if you are interested in Minecraft server development or just want to check out how my implementation works!!
Conclusion
Thank you so much for reading this very long post!!
I know I have not really posted on what I have been up to, but I am planning to create more projects and posts in the future, tho don’t expect them in a very consistent manner xD.
I hope you all have an amazing Christmas and Holiday season and have an incredible dayy! 🎄🎉
And sooooo as always! I shall see you on the next one! Hope you enjoyed this post, and Thanks so much for reading :D