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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Was thinking about this earlier today, but lately I’ve gotten burnt out on Final Fantasy XVI whether that be due to the tone, design or combat I am not too sure. Had a slow weekend for once and decided to pop in Atelier Ryza 2 as I recently picked up Ryza 3 due to it having a small print run. Spent most of the day playing it off and on, but the brighter and more positive tone was a boon compared to the drudgery of FFXVI.

    Atelier isn’t always my comfort food, but that was a nice change. That distinction would have to either go to rhythm games or to stuff like Trackmania or Minecraft where you can “shut off your brain” and just play. TM has a certain “flow” to the tracks that isn’t like anything else out there and Minecraft just throws you into the world and lets you go. (Albeit on Peaceful.)









  • While it has an upfront cost, I’d say the best way to play old consoles is by using flashcarts/ODEs/softmods and a proper scaler like the Retrotink 5x Pro or the Open Source Scan Converter. Those scalers take a multitude of inputs, scale and digitize them for output over HDMI. The RT5X can even do crazy stuff with filters to emulate CRTs and other effects.

    That said, doing all of that comes at a cost. SCART cables for each console are about $40 each and the scalers run ~$325 for the RT5x or $120 for the OSSC. Then if you want to get a way to switch inputs, thats another $50-200 there too. Worth it if you like your old consoles, but to just revisit that’d be an expensive proposition. Is a great way to futureproof them, even moreso with the upcoming Retrotink 4k but that thing won’t be cheap. (Estimated price is ~$1000)


    If you want to do it on the “cheap” but get as close to the originals, I’d highly suggest getting /making a MiSTer setup. This uses a FPGA to do emulation via hardware, which is about as close as you can to the originals providing the code is up to par. That’ll run about $300 all said and done, but gets you a crapton of systems all outputting over HDMI.









  • Probably the impetus for the mass exodus at my old job was the “We’ll Miss You” Zoom call we had for a beloved senior developer. The company had recently added a new manager role that hadnt existed before and things were fine. The new guy started micromanaging like crazy. The SD who was leaving basically went off during the call about how the company didn’t need NG’s role and how it was burning people out.

    I stuck around for another year-ish, and NG managed to make a group of about 20 developers dwindle to 5-ish. Saw the writing on the wall after getting shafted, changed jobs and am now making double that salary along with far less stress.