Spend as little time at home as possible. Travel. Find community. Live in a big city and make a ton of friends and throw lots of parties and bring people together, forming your own community. That's what I did and I feel like my 20s have been fulfilling, and I'm looking forward to what my 30s bring.
I don't think I'm trying to say something difficult. I'm replying to the post above mine:
1- "I suppose you'd have to ask him if he'd rather have lived a normal life": we don't need to ask Jackie Chan what he thinks, because he already answered in interviews: he thinks his life was worth it. That's sort of the point of the article.
2- "kids in Africa become slaves or child soldiers and end up dead.": yes, some kids have it worse than Jackie Chan's life. So?
You won't know until you have kids, though the way that you and your spouse were raised will be a good indicator. If you were raised differently, some reconciliation will be needed otherwise control will revert to the more "activist" parent. And having one kid won't tell you what it's like to have two, though your relationships with your siblings may be predictive.
I'm now of the opinion that behavior is driven by genetics to a considerable extent. Self disciplined parents with perfect control of their emotions will have self disciplined kids with perfect control of their emotions. These are also the people for whom all parenting methods work. For everybody else... good luck.
Day 1. Birth. My experience is they come with personalities from the first day. They just need more help early on. My goal is to mold them into autonomous agents to act. Each kid is on that path. Age is just a number, but I'm shooting to be mostly done by the time each hits 18.
My recommendation is to start with the CPU emulation. The CPU in the Gameboy has decent documentation and there are plenty of implementations to look at if you're stumped. (One I like particular is the core in Higan, a multisystem emulator written in C++.)
The main advantage to NES emulation is that it's a very mature area of study. High-quality documentation is much more readily available than for other systems, and there's more public discussion of the specific problems that NES emulator authors encounter (both primarily on nesdev.com [1] [2]). There's even a sort of tool-assisted speedrun of writing an accurate NES emulator, if you're into that sort of thing [3] [4].
Gameboy is actually a bit friendlier than the NES to get started with, because of the low number of mappers (programmable chips in the cartridges to do tricks with addressing, NES had much greater need for these than the GB due to the dearth of tile RAM). But Sega Master System is even friendlier, I hear.
Spend as little time at home as possible. Travel. Find community. Live in a big city and make a ton of friends and throw lots of parties and bring people together, forming your own community. That's what I did and I feel like my 20s have been fulfilling, and I'm looking forward to what my 30s bring.