I spent most of January just relaxing. For me, “relaxing” involved writing a chess engine, trudging my way through an online FPGA course, and video games (what a strange definition).
The chess engine went pretty well: I managed to get a working prototype in Typescript up and running. It’s butt-ugly and has a terrible UI, but it works. I made a half-hearted attempt to train a neural-net to act as the evaluation function during the tree search, but ran into issues with convergence. Hopefully latter me will figure that out.
I managed to get about halfway through the FPGA course. I ran into a frustrating bug when implementing UART. I testbenched my code. I made sure that the physical interface between the dev board and my PC was function. And inspite of all of this, I couldn’t receive any data from the FPGA. I then RTFM of the dev board and realized that the dev board assumed TX and RX were from the perspective of the PC. I had it flipped. It took me several days to figure that out. RIP.
I ran into a similar issue when implementing HDMI. I testbenched everything, but I’m just not able to get a image to display, which is a problem that I’m still running into.
Once the semester began, I started to work my way through this operating system class since that was one class I didn’t have time to get to during undergrad. The course utilizes Xv6, which is a toy operating system based on Unix V6; Xv86 was designed to be easily readable compared to more modern OS kernels like Linux. I’m slowly working my way through it; I’m currently at implementing some basic syscalls in the kernel.
I started writing a Verilog implementation of a game console called the GameTank that one of my friends made (it was his pandemic project…). After looking through the wiki, I made a rough block diagram of the system (see below) 
Luckily, there is an open source implementation of the W6502S which I can steal incorporate into the design. There is also an open source implementation of the VIA chip that was commonly used in company with the 6502 CPU. I’m currently wrangling the video pipeline, trying to figure out what display resolution would be the easier to implement for the game tank.