Pull Request: Nintendo DWC Emulator
I’ve found that I enjoy cleaning up code - specifically, code that was written for a language it clearly isn’t being programmed in. The classic example happened when I was grading CS1 assignments in Python - the people who had come from a Java-based background were a bit clueless about the way certain things worked, and so would often reimplement things that are built in to the syntax or libraries.
A recent Ars Technica post mentioned that some developers were reverse-engineering the servers used to play Nintendo DS games over wifi, since Nintendo shut down the servers. After looking at the code, I started getting flashbacks to my grading days.
Instead of Java style, I found something more startling - C style. Using indices to byte strings everywhere, declaring variables manually…I knew something had to be done.
So I filed a pull request. It ended up being both “larger than I thought” and “not large enough”. Unfortunately, trying to do too much while the project is under active development on the mainline causes merge problems, so this pull request is the first of what may be many.