
Porting Test Drive II from SNES to PC, Part 6: Portable tooling, not personal tooling
Porting Test Drive II from SNES to PC, Part 6: Portable tooling, not personal tooling One of the cleanup gates in this repo looked trivial at first: "Remove hard-coded personal Mesen paths from promoted scripts and Makefiles." It sounds like housekeeping. It was not. This is the kind of problem that makes a reverse-engineering repo quietly less reusable over time. The code still works on one machine, the docs still look plausible, and the examples still run for the person who wrote them. But the project stops being portable in practice. That is exactly the kind of debt that compounds. The actual wrappers were already in decent shape The interesting part of this checkpoint is that the runtime wrappers themselves were mostly not the problem anymore. For example: validation/run_mesen_capture.sh already resolves Mesen via: MESEN_BIN MESEN_RELEASE_DIR/Mesen Mesen or mesen on PATH tools/run_mesen_ppu_extract.sh already derives the release directory from: MESEN_BIN MESEN_RELEASE_DIR PATH That
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