Still Jaggin' It

I figured I should do a little update to let you folks know where I'm at with BigPEmu and my health. I'll get the health out of the way first, since I like to put crappy things before happy things.

I've been having a lot of joint pain over the last year, and have assumed this is probably inflammation relating to my cancer or an underlying autoimmune condition (which could be triggered by the cancer, or perhaps created the cancer to begin with, pure speculation) and should be treated as such. It's gotten really bad in my right knee and right wrist, which interferes with a lot of "daily life" stuff. Long story kind of short, I'm having to endure a bunch of really stupid things before my insurance will pay for any proper analysis or treatment there, and while my primary attempted to refer me to a rheumatologist, that referral hasn't gone through for some (probably terrible insurance) reason. I need to try to push that issue again. Physical therapy is among the stupid things I'm supposed to go through before getting the treatment I actually need. So I've been going along with it for the time being, in case I really end up having to endure a full 6 weeks of it before I can get any progress on treatment, and I think it's just exacerbating my problems. The system is failing again, I can't believe it.

Aside from that, I'm scheduled to get radioactive iodine treatment on March 15th, as my thyroglobulin is still elevated, which means I've still got thyroid cells swimming around. They may or may not be cancerous, and it's anyone's guess whether my remaining symptoms (the big bastards there being neck pain/swelling, the aforementioned joint pain, severe to the degree of "some people just kill themselves at this point" one-sided tinnitus, and recurrent infections) are related to the cancer, my immune system, or both. So I'm just blindly hoping this treatment will alleviate some of my issues. The nuclear medicine specialist is aligned on the total ambiguity there.

As my surgeon told me initially, this type of cancer "can't be treated with chemotherapy or radiotherapy" (she didn't mean radioactive iodine, which is a special case to target thyroid cells; we hope any mutated cancer cells are still behaving like thyroid cells), so my understanding is that the next line of defense, if it's metastasized in problematic places or has stopped taking up iodine, are some drugs with low efficacy rates. Things get more uncomfortably ambiguous at this point. Tests/imaging are fairly terrible at determining the presence of this cancer if it's mutated in a plethora of possible ways, some of which are also resistant to attempts to "re-activate" cells, which I think (but wasn't clear from the explanation) means doing things to try to make the cells start emitting thyroglobulin again. I haven't researched that end myself, since I'm not really there yet. But in any case, if symptoms persist, it's going to be pretty hard to tell if they're being caused by the cancer or some undiagnosed autoimmune condition. My money is actually on undiagnosed autoimmune condition either way, as I've been having problems which point to something of that nature since long before the onset of cancer symptoms.

So that's all of that. I've been struggling past all of this to get some contract work done this month to generate a bit more survival income, so I haven't gotten a whole lot of BigPEmu work done. But I am chipping away at developer/debugger features, and am working on the scripting interface in tandem. A lot of the features there are kind of going hand-in-hand with the developer build features, so I figured I might as well work on them together.

I did go a little off the developer path to start integrating a VM purely for the scripting interface, though! I really am not a fan of Lua as a language, and since I expect most of my target audience for this system consists of Jaguar developers, it makes sense to employ a lower-level language like C for the scripting. So I've gone the Quake 3 VM route! I want to include the VM compiler in the emulator itself as a convenience, so that it's functionally the same as something like Lua or Python. You place the script in the scripts folder, the emulator automatically picks it up, compiles it, and performs whatever functionality. (like adding some event hooks, registering options, adding breakpoints from event hooks for some particular game, etc.) Compiler output is meanwhile directed to the log, assuming logging is enabled. I might make a "console mode" to compile scripts and log output to the command prompt as well, I figure some people might prefer this mode of iteration over just having the log file opened in something that auto-reloads on change.

You may be wondering why I don't just use native libraries. The answer is "convenience, accessibility, and portability." Portability is a big one, people write scripts in C and they just automagically work on every platform BigPEmu ends up being ported to, so I'm thinking ahead on the porting agenda here. I also have the option to not even bother porting the embedded compiler to certain platforms if that ends up being desirable for whatever reason, and those ports will still be able to run the VM binary generated from another platform.

At the moment, for the VM bytecode generation, I'm using a version of Tiny C Compiler that's MIT-licensed (I cleaved off all the non-MIT bits) with a custom codegen module to spit out my own VM binary. I'm in the early stages of deciding on the VM specs, I'm thinking I might actually just use an existing RISC machine instruction set, maybe a MIPS chip, or perhaps even the actual Jaguar GPU or DSP instruction set. The latter could end up turning into an interesting potential tool for Jaguar developers, although TCC is definitely not intended to be an optimizing compiler, and will be generating far-from-ideal RISC code. I'd be more for the idea of writing an LLVM backend for GPU/DSP code on the "targeting a real Jaguar" side of things, but that's significantly more work, and even if the licensing were compatible (I don't think it is), I don't want the massive overhead of including LLVM with a C frontend in the emulator. So that task couldn't really benefit the emulator itself. But still, even with TCC, a Jaguar GPU running user script code is an entertaining thought, and a standalone TCC to generate Jaguar RISC code might still be preferable to the old DOS-based C compiler. That is, for generating some base code to then be refined by hand and/or heavily combined with inline assembly. From a more pragmatic perspective, though, I'd hate for such a tool to lead to more sub-optimal Jaguar games/ports because people have a more accessible option to generate crappy GPU/DSP code.

I know I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole there, which deviates a bit from the core features needed for the developer/debugger builds. But, it's all still getting done! I'm not sure when I'll actually get my next release up with all of the medical goings-on and the prep I have to do leading up to my ingestion of nuclear material next month. But rest assured I'll continue chipping away at BigPEmu with whatever spare energy I can muster.

As always, thank you all for the continued support. The Patreon income is of incredible help, especially right now, and I'll continue doing my best to do all of that support justice.