Projects

Project Log Diasassembly/PicoBoot Honestly this wasn’t too bad. I mostly followed this guide, but honestly once I skipped through it enough, I could probably do this by memory now. The GameCube is a bit of an engineering marvel in its simplicity. After the security screws are out from the outside the rest is pretty easy peasy. We also found a tiny spider exoskeleton living underneat the drive assembly! I honestly left it all in there because that’s just a fun little story with it, and it wasn’t harming anything/was clearly stuck to the heat shield....

For a long time I’ve been obsessed with the idea of making my own arcade cabinet, looking at plans/learning about JAMMA, and getting a sense of what I’d actually need to do it. At first I just wanted to make a MAME setup cause I’m a big fan of emulation as a way of preservation, but as I got more into collecting physical games for consoles, I wanted to have a way to play REAL hardware if I could, plus I don’t like the idea of input lag/other stuff that comes with emulating....

I got inspired by how this guy did his OOT map but I had ideas for features and bugs I could fix, mainly relating to parsing a spoiler log at the time. I went to his github and his code was all there, but he was missing the actual map files compiled together using Leaflet. These weren’t maps he made himself, and he was just piggybacking off these great maps from VGMaps....

I wanted a quicker way to download and patch Super Mario World ROM hacks from Super Mario World Central so I made a quick python script/CLI interface that would parse the HTML table from the page, download the zip/rom for you, unzip and IPS/BPS patch your ROM, and spit it back out to you. There’s really not much to it, but it’s saved me a bunch of time when I just want to play X hack and don’t want to fuss with the browser to grab it....

I got a new Sony Bravia OLED TV since my last one mysteriously got a hole in it. Everything still worked great for my OSSC setup, EXCEPT the SNES, which is plugged into it almost 24/7. After some digging I learned there’s “dejiter” kit for the SNES that fixes the issue. Now, to be clear, I recognize this isn’t a problem with the SNES. The SNES/OSSC worked perfect with no modification on my old TV....

I was looking for a super simple/minimal static site generator that just does the bare minimum in terms of just rendering markdown and renders it on an html page. No backend server whatsoever, no crazy yarn/node libraries to generate pages, nothing. Super simple. No bullshit. It’s actually way harder than you probably think. So I found ssg which is written completely in POSIX shell script. Using commands you more than likely already have on any UNIX-like system (and providing you have lowdown or Markdown....

st is a terminal for X by suckless which is completely barebones/almost featureless, on purpose. The entire idea/philosophy is to get away from software with features/bloat you would never use, and instead (if you need them) to implement those features yourself. This lets the focus go towards the core terminal features instead of feature developers “think” everyone wants. Suckless provides a sort of repository of diff patches to accomodate this....

What? You mean your BIOS splash screen isn’t Banjo Kazooie? Since the x200 supported by coreboot I decided to free the BIOS via hardware flashing, specifically using the skulls project as the base. Pretty risky but since I got the x230 for semi-cheap ($200ish?) I thought I might as well try. I got an SOIC clip from Amazon (this one), opened the x230 and exposed both BIOS chips, and flashed both of them with the help of my T480 as the host....

tldr; Game stats website/server: https://ut2004.thevorticon.com/ Hell Yeah Dude UT2004 Server Ever since I played a giant fun instagib server I’ve wanted to find/play all those fun simple yet crazy maps. It took a lot of effort to go through 15+yr old forums and downloads but I think I’m at a good place where I’ve got a pretty big collection of content to go nuts with. I’m still in the process of changing the server rules/addons....