Wrapping up
Congrats! You have made it through the first part of this tutorial. By this point, you have a basic enough understanding of the console that you know how to display a picture. And hey, that doesn’t sound like much, but consider everything you have seen so far—there is a lot that goes into it!
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Honestly, congrats on coming this far—many people have given up earlier than this. So you can give yourself a pat on the back, you honestly deserve it! Now may also be a good time to take a break if you are reading all this in a single trait. I encourage you to give it a little time to sink in, and maybe go back to the lessons you struggled on the most. Maybe a second read can help.
And yes, you could simply have let a library handle all that. However, the details always leak through eventually, so knowing about them is helpful, if only for debugging.
Plus, understanding what’s really going on under the hood makes you a better programmer, even if you don’t end up using ASM in the long run. Amusingly, even modern systems work similarly to older ones in unexpected places, so some things you just learned will carry over! Trust me, everything you have learned and will learn is worth it! ✊
That said, right now, you may have a lot of questions.
- Why do we turn off the LCD?
- We know how to make a static picture, but how to we add motion into the mix?
- Also, how do I get input from the player?
- The code mentions shutting down audio, but how do I play some of those famed beeps and bloops?
- Writing graphics in that way sound tedious, is there no other way?
- Actually, wait, how do we make a game out of all this??
… All of that answered, and more, in Part Ⅱ! 👀