I grew up with CRTs and bought one at a retro game conference to put on my desk for some gaming. I had all but forgotten the deafening noise they make. The sound is hard to describe if you have not heard it. The sound hits different than an arcade with a bunch of noises and music and everything going on, but in my generally quiet office you can hear it from 2 rooms away when it is on. I tend to prefer how the SNES looks on the CRT compared to any modern screen with super sharp pixels, but that is easily (expensively?) fixed with a RetroTINK 4K to get the CRT style filters. The noise is just something to consider I don't see discussed often. My cats had never heard that noise and it freaked them out the first time they heard it.
I find the noise of a crt much more pleasing than the noise of a bad lcd. To me the crt is musical but the lcd is shrill.
I think hard drives are similar. There was something pleasing about the the 30MB ESDI in my first computer, but as hard drives got larger and faster, they also got more scratchy-sounding. Now I have a cheap PCIe M.2 adapter, and the sound it makes is like the newer hard drives, only less rhythmic. That alone makes it an irritant.
Nice! Remarkably similar to my own PNG implementation. I don't think I have pushed up the encoding work I did but should. I would highly recommend anyone / everyone to write a parser for a file format, you learn a lot. I also didn't implement the interlacing support.
My goal was not to be fast however, but to just document a good reference and be able to come back to it and understand what it was doing and what I wrote.
One important item was a custom OCR for the magazine scans, particularly those with text on a crazy background. This was discussed in a Patreon call but might also be discussed in the podcast, I haven't listened through just yet. Another important distinction is it is actually being run and curated as a library (backend is preservica.com), not a grab bag like Archive.org can end up being, so the data will be more consistently correct.
That actually would be a topic of particular interest to this community.
Some of the layouts of these enthusiast magazines are so chaotic (looking at you Hardcore Gamefan) that the current technology for parsing text from scans wasn't good enough and they had to develop their own.
I signed up for the iOS beta and haven't used any of the writing tools, but the AI summary of texts or emails has been really nice for glancing at the phone and getting a glance, especially for wall of text texters.
I run several sites but 2 of them tend to come up more in interviews and are all linked from my GitHub profile:
https://sfc.fm - A website to listen to Super Nintendo music in the browser. Folks usually find this more cool, talk about WASM and covers several common things we can skip over talking about items like RESTful APIs and random JavaScript questions.
https://wiki.superfamicom.org - A website for all things programming the Super Nintendo. This tends to be more interesting to management folk (which is interesting on its own) but tends to be a point in an interview where the "can this person actually program" questions end and culture questions start getting more specific. Recruiters also tend to latch onto this one as well.
No one ever mentions my blog, but I don't post all that much and the content is technical, but usually very niche.
Love this! I've been working on and running https://sfc.fm for about 7 years now so very similar interests!
One thing I did notice was the in the SPC emulation, particularly in Super Mario World `12a Athletic.spc` there is a lot of echo / reverb that isn't present in the actual file or game, is there secondary effect processing happening somewhere, I couldn't seem to turn it off, you can play it here https://sfc.fm/sfc/super-mario-world track 16
Yes, as I mentioned in other comment, Pixeltune applies a reverb effect on some of the cores. There's currently no way to turn it off but there will in the near future. :)
A similar thing happened with the Wolfenstein 3D port as well, where John Carmack gave Rebecca Heineman kudos for learning Japanese to read the patents to get the technical documentation, always cool history around these things, some more in my post about it here:
https://eludevisibility.org/super-noahs-ark-3d-source-code
We met on Tinder, both with "joke" profiles and neither of us seriously "playing the game". We ended up meeting and hitting it off. That was a decade ago and through COVID and everything else there is no one else I would rather work from home with and spend my whole day with.
+2 for Tinder. Not me, I've met my wife through a mutual friend who knew both of us are single but 2 of my very good friends met their future wives there. Another terminally online friend met a girl on Discord in a game server. Started chatting, met in real life and the rest is history. Rest of my friends met offline: same hobby/friends/asking out in a bar/colleague/neighbor/etc.
A custom made wiki for documents and resources related to developing software (games) for the Super Nintendo / Super Famicom. Started in 2010 and still going strong, switched software a few years ago from Ruby to Node.
An online emulator for the SPC700, the sound chip from the Super Nintendo / Super Famicom with a large selection of the game library's OST to listen to. Designed to scratch a personal itch and play with Emscripten years ago.
https://mplusfonts.github.io/