Merry F*$%ing Christmas

http://www.1up.com/news/rumor-krome-studios-shutting-down

The wonderful, challenging and above all steadily paid project I've been on most of the year has come to an end. According to reports Krome (who were writing "Microsoft Game Room") hit financial trouble and let all but a handful of it's staff go. I was one of the lucky ones who continued to work with them on Game Room. Sadly it has now come to an end and I'm out of a job. The Krome guys were fantastic. They were hard working and diligent yet managed to be laid back at all times. We did some brilliantly technical and wonderfully challenging work on the project and everyone involved was very sad to see it come to an end.

The work itself was very diverse and interesting. I was tasked with decoding the custom hardware on the arcade boards and writing emulators for them. My time was split between analysing the hardware (photo), analysing the original arcade code and writing the emulation for the decoded components. It was at times extremely difficult and challenging but we knew it wasn't imposible. Mainly because several freeware emulators had done it all before. For obvious reasons we could not, under any circumstances, look at any other emulator. This effectively meant we were starting from scratch. We did however have one big advantage. We were legal! We had the approval and permission of the relevant arcade manufacturers. I and several other coders on the team had actually written emulators before. Personally I'd written a ZX Spectrum, Game Gear, Master System and Game Boy emulator some years back so I was aware of how this sort of system worked. I'm also an accomplished hardware designer and had previously reverse engineered several of the 8 bit consoles back in the day. But that's another story.

Anyway, back to the theme. It's Christmas and I'm out of work again. Ok, technically I'm not out of work as I work for myself but I don't have an income into my company at the moment which is the same thing. Let's hope that some of the feelers I've sent out recently come back with offers of work.

Merry Christmas everyone,