347: Is That The Monster from Godzilla?

You ever do the thing where you find a thing that you're looking for and you're like, oh, man, that's great. I found the thing I'm looking for. And then you're like, but I don't need it right now. I'm going to put it someplace safe. And then you're never going to believe what happened next. Go on. When I got to the point that I was like, I need the thing, I couldn't remember where the safe place was. So I needed an Ethernet dongle for a USB-C Ethernet dongle for a project I'm working on. Okay. okay and i was like i absolutely have one of these because i used to have a laptop that didn't have an ethernet port i needed wired ethernet so i had a usbc ethernet dongle that at the time when i bought it in 2017 was probably like 60 because they used to be really expensive and i was like i'm gonna find i cleaned out my desk i found it i was like this is great fantastic put it someplace safe i went to get it yesterday and anyway the tldr is i ordered one from amazon and got here this morning so it's 15 bucks oh no the place where is the secret place the safe amazon it turns out the secret place is amazon so thanks anchor for my usbc ethernet dongle uh way cheaper than the last one and the cable's nicer so i guess that's good i'm gonna put that on top of my desk where i have to look at it until i use it so it's not in a safe place from this point on everything goes in the This is why we have the junk drawer. The one drawer, it's a nightmare, but it's where you know you can always find something. Junk drawers always got you. I'm going to go and tell you, I've lived in this house for almost 20 years now. My entire house is the junk drawer, Wes. They're all junk drawers. The whole thing. I did such a good job when I was doing VR stuff, and I needed to have like 10 by 10 square foot space to do VR stuff in my office. So my office was always really clean. The floor was always clear. I had well-defined areas on the walls where the shelves were and nothing else in the room. And then I stopped doing VR stuff and immediately now I have two CRTs. I got a printer. I got a 3D printer, got an air conditioner. I've got a million spools of filament. I got an old monitor. It's a disaster over there. I was just talking to a friend of the pod, Steve Lynn, a couple of days ago about some new mini DV tapes that I discovered at my father's house that I now need to digitize. And Steve was like, oh, well, you know, the good thing is most of those players would use Firewire. They'd have firewire built in. And I had a black and white flashback moment to me looking at a firewire cable in my my box of cables that I'd kept for 15 years and going, just let it go. You're never going to use this firewire cable and throw it in the trash. So so here's the funny thing. I I have two firewire cables, one 400 and one 800 that are in the keeper drawer. so there's like there's there's the cables that i don't think about and when i need one i can't find it i just hit the amazon button and i feel bad about it but i do it anyway because like shipping's free and it'll be here tomorrow but the firewire 800 and 400 both really hard to get i also i've added to the keeper drawer on rca cables since i got the crts back in my life rca s video i don't have a scart because i'm not any kind of i'm not that kind of weird pervert but I do have some component cables in there and um that's that's pretty much that's that's the end of my line so well it turned out uh that I was lucky to have not immediately jumped on Amazon and buy the Firewire cable because I came home checked the tape again and you know what it's VHSC oh you win I win I got good news and bad news because the adapter for VHSC to a normal VHS player is about 60 bucks now i win and i lose Welcome to Brad and Will made a tech pod. I'm Will. And I'm not Brad. I'm Wes. Southerner filling in. Welcome, Wes Fenlon. A little further south, a little... But a fairly large number of guest appearances on the show now. Welcome back to the show, Wes. It's a privilege. Next time I will remember, if I'm filling in for Brad, to mess with the bass on my mic so I come in twice as deep as I normally do, then i can be a good fake fake brad i can bring you down i can i can eq you all the way down just take out all the highs and uh and and bring you into the extreme low but uh wes if you don't know is a you're a senior editor yeah senior editor at pc gamer i've been there for 12 years oh my god holy crap yeah which means it's been uh more than 12 years since i i worked for you will uh worse we're aging more rapidly than ever the funny thing about that is when you when you were like hey i think i'm gonna take this job at pc gamer i was like oh you shouldn't do that games media isn't gonna last but you're you guys are holding out you're holding strong out there so congratulations we're trying it sort of feels like uh well i was saying to you before we recorded the podcast sort of feels a little bit like being in a rowboat at the edge of the world and turns out the world is not a sphere it is in fact uh two-dimensional and you can fall off the edge of it uh into the abyss never to be seen again but we're pedaling as hard as we can yeah that's so there's a three or four metaphors in there but i i get what you're talking about um you're also the proprietor of the rom read only memo uh bi-weekly newsletter about uh emulation and emulation happenings is that yeah you nailed it um every every two weeks when i can sometimes i miss a week i have to delay a little bit when there's something like a summer game fest going on but um yeah it's pretty much every two week and i mean it's it is ostensibly about emulation sometimes the stuff i'm writing about is a little bit more you know just loosely related to emulation i love writing about fan translations of you know japanese games usually uh and those most people play in emulators and most people develop them using emulators but you could still you know put it on a flash cart and play one of these on a super nintendo if you wanted to most of the time i i think it's safe to say that stuff is emulation adjacent enough that you're not out over your skis yeah i think the the audience overlap is about 98 there so i feel pretty good about it one circle with a little sliver off to the side um but yeah yeah so a bunch of interesting stuff has happened in emulation i'm bummed that brad's not here he's still out on some personal stuff um and uh he he's definitely like he's appreciates the thoughts people have been sending really nice messages so um but so i'm bummed he's not here to talk about this but i'm excited that you're here to talk about it because i i have a lot of questions there's been like it seems like the well okay so two topics we're going to do two topics today just to the front so people know yeah the first one is we're gonna talk about recompiles and what's going on with that whole scene and d and the difference between recompiles and decompiles kind of get into that and then there's also been a lot of cool stuff happening in the mystery scene which we haven't talked about in a minute and we're going to get to that at the end um like some wild stuff is happening over there so let's let's start with the recompiles though because this seems like the kind of hotness especially for it's like early 3d games mostly is where it seems like the real exciting stuff is happening like nintendo 64 playstation stuff like that yeah i would say it's i mean there are projects that you know go as far back as like nes and game boy there are people tackling that stuff but i i agree with you that like the exciting stuff and where there is the most action right now is in that early to i guess you would call like the xbox 360 mid 3d era i don't know but you know we're kind of talking like 95 to 2010 is kind of where like a lot of these projects are are really like taking taking off right now wes it's 2026 we can call that turn of the century now jesus yeah i guess we can um but yeah so the the kind of the really like active projects for uh game recompilations which are ports of older games to or they don't even necessarily have to be older but ports of games to a platform they were not originally designed for uh it's really focused around the n64 and the xbox 360 and then there's also some stuff kind of starting to take off around the ps1 and there are projects starting to dig into like the gamecube and wii as well but i don't know when you're going to actually be playing uh playing any of those that's still really early it seemed like to me that the first thing that really took off was a recomp of mario 64 right yes and no that was a this is where it gets really confusing because that was a originally that was a decompilation of the game that got a port that was not using this uh framework uh called n64 recompiled that a lot of the ports are now based off of but it was like effectively for the end user it was the same thing you're playing a version of a game where they've, you know, reverse engineered what the code for the original game was doing, rewritten it to run on, you know, Windows or Linux or whatever on a on a x86 processor, and then kind of built basically a version of the game that you just plug your ROM code into so they can distribute it without the assets of the original game. So the Nintendo doesn't nuke them from orbit. And then because they've reprogrammed it for this other platform, you can get all the kind of niceties of that platform right like you can run the game at 600 fps you can do texture mods you can do ultra wide all of that you can do you know like instant xbox controller mapping all of that like nice stuff that you would kind of expect from a pc game but you would not expect from an n64 game running in an emulator for example and and okay so the process you you hit it a second ago but i'm just gonna say it again so these people rewrite the code for the game so they're basically rewriting the game executable yeah and then you're providing a rom which of course you've ripped yourself using like a retron or something like that you know pull it pulled it off of your own cart that you own yep everyone does that yes and you're not using so this avoids like the problems that people that companies have with buy with emulators where you don't have to have like a pirated bias that's a copyrighted file that comes off of the console you're not you're not running uh you know illegal software in any way shape or form here exactly and and a lot of the i mean the amazing thing about emulation is you are targeting a system and you're you're trying to recreate you know every minute function of that hardware and how games used it and that's really cool and i still love that but this is a much more like specific way of re-implementing those games without a lot of the, I guess you would say the baggage that comes with that from a game playing perspective, right? Like if you're trying to, you know, do unlocked frame rates in a game, you can't, there are ways to maybe do that with an emulator, but you're, you're trying to like replicate the original hardware and then like overclock that emulated CPU, for example, right? Which is very different than untethering your code from how that original hardware worked and reprogramming it for this new platform. So like a lot of these N64 ports can run at hundreds and hundreds of FPS because they're not worried about like accurately representing the N64 CPU, which was not very powerful compared to a 16 core CPU today. Well, it was a two megabyte of RAM system or something like that at the time. um i think you go up to four with the with the memory expansion card right maybe it was i think it was eight with the expansion card maybe but yeah not much not much room so we had mike mike from digital eclipse on years and years ago talking about um like archival games we should we should actually revisit that topic because it's been a long time since we talked to him but he talked about how they re remastered like megaman uh for that megaman collection so that it felt exactly the same and the movement was the same and like the the frames were the same essentially when you're playing whether you're playing on the the version for the modern consoles or the the older version uh rather than using an emulated version and like is this the same process for that but just done freelance or yeah the the interesting thing is like a lot of the like legacy collections of of older games are not this process a lot of them are running an emulator of some kind but that megaman legacy collection that digital eclipse did actually is static recompilation so it is kind of the predecessor of the a lot of these fan projects that are now popping up um they they kind of did it bespoke for that set of was it the first four or five megaman games something like that for the nes it was it was like this ness and ness ones i think right um but but not megaman x or yeah yeah it didn't have the x games but so they they kind of I don't know that that was the first use of this necessarily but they did it you know 10 years ago or so and people kind of finally in the hobby community caught on to being able to do this themselves I think it really started to come to a head when more of these games were getting decompiled and people were kind of looking at that and going oh okay like here's sort of another way we can get at this without having to go through this incredibly lengthy process of like matching up every single function of the game code, which is what you do in a decompilation, which can take years unless you have a lot of people working on it. Are they starting with the decompiled code or is there something more complicated happening now? So the main projects right now that are interesting and have a lot of activity around them are N64 Recompiled and Rex Glue, which is for the Xbox 360. And Rex Glue is kind of built on top of some other recompilation projects for the 360. and it's sort of like bundling stuff up and making it a bit easier to use. But the gist of it is they're building a framework that it is not nearly this simple, but the idea is that you could take an N64 game, plop it into this N64 recompiled SDK, I think they're calling it SDK, and basically have it just recognize what the code of that N64 game is doing and properly match it to c code that could run on your pc so in the like dream scenario version you're just plugging that a game in and it's just like yep this is how it should run on the pc and just does it all for you it's it's not that right now it's more a much more manual process but that's kind of like that's that's what they're going for with this thing and then it comes along with they've done a lot of work to create like a graphics renderer that works well on pc and like a kind of port um uh ui and stuff so that you've kind of got your like launcher and your controller settings and stuff built in well because okay so there's an interesting thing that happened in the transition from 2d games to 3d games and it's the the thing that changed is that the 3d renderer is kind of generic especially for the first couple of 3d generations right it's just rendering triangles on screen and how it processes those triangles and how it processes those textures and more my understanding is that at least on the early hardware up through the 360 and ps3 generation ps3 is a little special i know the the kind of like it's just texture filtering and and triangles and it's pretty straightforward the the pipelines through there so you can have kind of a genericized renderer for the 360 or the n64 the gamecube that that just kind of works on all the games and then you just have to run the game code through the through the other part of the is that an oversimplification or i mean some some of that is honestly beyond my my head every time i try to get into the the like the real technical explainy side of this i i feel how much I am not a programmer. So I try not to say anything too boneheaded. But like the simplistic version of it is you are able to put a version of a game into N64 recompiled and it kind of starts you on your way towards having a version of it that is recompiled into C code. And then from there, you just have to do a lot of the work to match up kind of like the game specific stuff, because every console game is doing something funky here or there with how it was programmed to make best use of the hardware, especially in this era where they had very limited hardware rights. So, you know, a game like Rogue Squadron or something which has not been recompiled yet is probably a freaking nightmare because they were getting so much juice out of the N64. well i was going to say yeah this is the era when the difference between the start of generation games and the end of generation games were they were to look wildly different from each other and it's because people figured out more and more ways to get a little bit more a little bit more here and a little bit more there and then all of a sudden unlocked whole new whole new layers of capability um so i can read you like this is a very um this is just the kind of the beginning of the how it works section on the N64 Recomp GitHub. But it just says the recompiler works by accepting a list of symbols and metadata alongside the binary with the goal of splitting the input binary into functions that are each individually recompiled into a C function named according to the metadata. So that's the basics of it. But then, you know, there's a reason these projects can take many months or even potentially years to actually come together because it's not as simple as a drag and drop, right? But that's the starting point. And as it finds more and more unique code pass through, it's going to need more. My guess is this is like the Proton situation that Valve's taken on, where they started by fixing the most common emulation problems, and now as they get further and further in, they find more and more edge cases until at some point when the last game goes into the N64 recompiler, it just work out of the box because they have found all of those edges before I don know This is maybe an oversimplification I do assume that as the project continues to mature and more people do recompilations with it that it will get you know it will become faster and easier and whatnot I hope that's the case. But we are starting to see, I think, like a pretty substantial acceleration in how many are coming out, though, whether you're going to want to play all of them or not. remains to be seen that's a little tease for what we'll talk about later i mean look the n64 generation is notoriously uneven there's some real bangers on there and then there's a lot of also like not so much hey there are as many as a dozen great games on the nintendo 64 yeah that seems about right um look i loved 1080p 1080 snowboarding back in the day but i don't think i'm going to play any 1080 snowboarding in in 2026 one of the things i do think is really exciting about n64 recomp in particular though is there's so many n64 games that just i i think looking back were hobbled by the capabilities of that system you know and so one of the recomps that's in progress right now is uh castlevania 64 a game i never played a lot of but that actually seemed really cool to me but it just like was too limited by what they could do with camera control, the frame rate capabilities of that game. But it was like weird and experimental in cool ways. And that's a game that I would love to play on a not Nintendo 64 controller with like, you know, a right stick to be able to pivot the camera and maybe a draw distance increase beyond, you know, 10 feet in front of you. I think there's a lot of stuff with these games that it's not going to be the pure recreation of the pure experience but it could let some of these games shine in a way that they could not on that hardware so yeah i mean i think that's a that's a good point what some of the stuff that is some of the so performance obviously is going to be better running on modern hardware in a in a native environment but doing things like adding right stick camera support for a platform that didn't really have two stick controllers outside of that one weird golden i mode um is is interesting is there other stuff that people are adding on top of that or were they putting like 3d sound or anything weird in is it yeah there's there's quite a range of stuff um the the renderer for the n64 recompiled stuff uh it's called rt64 and it supports or is going to support uh i'm not sure if it's actually this part of it's finished yet but they're like they're working on ray tracing for it um that's one thing some of the games uh are either launching with or getting post-launch support with mods that are maybe not outside the realm of what you could have done with a rom hack for these games but are much easier to do with a recompilation basically because of the way the n64 recomp framework was designed it was designed with modding in mind and so it makes the output c code that it's recompiled like just way easier to plug and play with a mod whereas with rom hacking like you're going into the memory and trying to squeeze stuff into places you know in the in the rom so the uh one of the recent recompilations uh was for harvest moon 64 this just came out about two weeks ago and the developer of that actually put out a mod that he designed with a like harvest moon i'm guessing a super fan the guy who had been decompiling it so this guy spent like three years decompiling it and then collaborated with the recomp developer to put out a mod that does some things like um i think they let you like change the the timing of the game like the clock stuff um i'll actually look it up what i had in it but basically they looked at it and they were like there have been a lot of harvest moon games since 64 this one's kind of rough people who are going to be playing it on this recomp who are just kind of curious about this older game in the series are probably going to bounce off of it because it's a little harsh now but what if we uh did music persistence so instead of the music restarting every time you move from one map screen to another it just plays continuously that sounds lovely they made it so that when it rains your crops get watered which feels like a thing that should have happened right yeah uh they added faster message speed so yeah like this was a mod that came out like on release day so they this was almost them saying like here's our you know director's cut version of how we think this game could play uh you know 25 years later with hindsight i actually kind of like that like it makes me think that like the the possibility of having say an ocarina where you have an ocarina of time where you have right stick control or or um animal crossing where you can stack fruit in the version that was out on the gamecube yeah that sounds really nice i think the perfect example of this uh is in the donkey kong 64 recomp which isn't out yet but just got announced about a week ago and in this recomp they're gonna have a mod um this is developed by a member of the recomp community and some guys who've spent years working on the dk64 randomizer so they know the game like inside and out and one of the mods they're gonna have at launch is the ability to swap I think they're calling it tag tag anywhere, but to swap between Kongs at any spot in the level. And I don't remember if you don't know if you remember Donkey Kong 64. I 100% did DK64, but it's been 30 years. Yeah. So you would have to pick up different colored bananas with each Kong in each level. And when you were not the Kong that could pick up that color banana, they would be like transparent to just tease you and be like, oh, there's some blue bananas here. but you can't pick them up unless you switch over to Chunky or Lanky or whoever picked up the blue ones. So you'd have to go find a barrel to switch Kongs. And they're adding a mod where you can just, you know, press a button anywhere in the map and just switch between characters, cut out 15 hours of backtracking from that. Yeah, those were bad hideous. I was going to say the other mod I would make for that is just one to add like 15 more types of collectibles throughout the game. Because if you're playing DK64, that's clearly what you're there for. You're there for that punishment yeah yeah you want those bad bananas oh banana i mean look the other the other option you want in that game is the ability to just play dk rap for just on loop the entire time it's going non-stop so like the star trek uh engine noise 24 hour loop videos except the dk rap yeah exactly that is like the cruelest thing i think you could inflict on another human being i support it. Look, sometimes you just want more DK rap in your life. What about, you mentioned Rogue Squadron, which is like my all-time favorite. I mean, realistically, I like the GameCube versions. The N64 one is a fine place to start, but those two GameCube games are all-time bangers on my list, and they're kind of still notoriously hard to emulate. I feel like Dolphin has kind of got there eventually, but they require some real horsepower. Is anything happening on that front? As far as I know, there is no recompilation in the works for Rogue Squadron. I think there is a decomp on GitHub that has had some amount of progress to it, but I don't think it's active right now. So I don't think that's one that's going to be coming anytime soon. that said from what I've witnessed in the recomp server the people who really know their stuff like they know how to use this framework they're good programmers that they're dedicated to a particular game they can spin one of these things up pretty quickly so if there was somebody who just really really wanted to take on Rogue Squadron I wouldn't be surprised if they could do it in a few months and have it out but as far as i know no one has taken up that torch so far well it's it's the whole thing is really interesting because like you don't have to decompile it first in order for the recomp to be effective right you just have to have somebody who's pretty good at symbol debugging and then the ability to rewrite the functions that need to be rewritten to do the thing that they want you do not have to though it does seem like it is such a advantage to have that decompiled code where everything is mapped out so you can tell what all the functions do is really helpful in speeding up the recomp process because that feels to me like it's basically having your like cheat sheet for the test next to you so instead of having to like solve all the problems when you hit them in the recompilation process you can just be like oh what is this thing and just like look over the decompiled code and figure it out quite quickly so not every single recomp that's come out had a completed decompilation, but quite a few of them did. So I think that has been like a big boon to the process for those games and sped them up a lot. But you don't have to have it for sure. And I think that is the goal of this process is that eventually it will hopefully get to a spot where people aren't spending years decompiling games unless they just want to do it for the challenge or for the research. You'll be able to do a recompilation a lot more quickly. and and um the n64 seems perfect for this partly because the controls for the n64 are notoriously bad partly because the kind of flat 3d art style scales up really really well i think i think it is especially if you do a little bit of texture work fairly minimal texture work compared to a modern game yeah like those games could look incredible especially the n64 and gamecube era um and then also i think because like the performance stuff that you mentioned before like that was a notoriously underperforming system in terms of frame rate back in the day and and um like you you listed a whole bunch of recent n64 recomp releases we've talked about a couple of them but like bomberman 64 which i remember being super good and duke nukem zero hour which i never would have played because i had a pc yeah and is that just new 3d is it a different game i actually don't know i i i'm kind of curious now i want to fire up the mr and see but um i i like i can't imagine nintendo being like oh yeah we got to get new come on our platform because like there were strippers and like you shot a bunch of cops and like i don't know man uh is snowboard kids too good i don't remember that at all that's on your list as well yeah it's one i never played um so I don't know, but I will probably check out the recompilation. N64 cartridges were expensive back in the day, it turns out. So there's also a lot of stuff happening in other, in other, you'd mentioned some Xbox 360 stuff. We talked about some PlayStation. Yeah. What, do you want to kind of tip into that? Yeah, I'm really excited for Rex Glue, the Xbox 360 recompilation framework, because, I mean, did those games run better than N64 games in general? Yes, for sure. but I think it is similarly a system that has a lot to gain from recompilation one there's still a decent number of games from that generation that just never got you know HD ports right there's some stuff that's just kind of marooned on the Xbox 360 and I think especially early on a lot of games on that platform were you know either not running at even 720p or they did but The frame rate was kind of a mess. Like it was very much a like figuring things out transition era. Right. In the same way that N64 was, we were just like figuring out 3D on consoles, period. With the Xbox 360, it was like, oh, shit, we got to do this HD thing. How do we make this work? A lot of smooth 20 and a lot of real iffy UIs, either on the 720p version or on the SD version. One was going to be bad on every game you played pretty much. Totally. Yeah. Those occasional games where you're just like, oh, I just can't read any of the text. in this game on my TV. That's cool. Yeah. So like one of the first kind of like big in-depth projects for Rex glue is coming from the guy who built the framework is going to be blue dragon, which is one of the two mist Walker games. I'm more of a fan of lost Odyssey. Cause it's the more final fantasy one. Blue dragon is the more dragon questy one. But it was a game that I kind of always wanted to play and never got too deep into you there are things about it you look at and you're like the ui in this game looks like dev ui like it looks like they had to ship it without finishing the the ui it's very weirdly like barren and stuff um but the develop the developer was like sending me um showing me some little video clips and stuff of working on it and like there are like animations in the game that just didn't play out properly i guess because they were glitched or something like that and so there's stuff like that that he's like fixing in this um the recompilation port uh and it's another game with like a really nice art style to run at like 4k right because it had this kind of cutesy uh you know it's a curatoriyama art the textures and stuff are fairly simple but very bright and colorful so it should scale really nicely to you know 4k rendering um so i'm really excited to see that one come to fruition i think it's not too far off um but the the rexluse stuff gets a little bit more complicated than with the n64 where right now it's sort of this stapled together process of recompilation for the cpu uh functioning but then the gpu stuff is actually using the core of the xbox 360 emulator um xenia so right now they're not actually recompiling all of the graphics stuff into its own you know like separate engines so you're basically not getting the kind of performance gains from the like graphics performance that you would get if you could just run it like fully natively on your gpu basically but that is like a long-term goal of the project is to decouple from the emulator but basically right now they're like we compile the cpu we will emulate the gpu and that still gets us like a game that will run at 300 fps or something on pc which is you know pretty good i would love to play chrome hounds at 4k 300 frames per second that sounds great hell yeah um so this project is kind of in a state where people are doing recomps with rex glue but there hasn't yet been a release from the main developer that is like the kind of um the benchmark for what's going to be doable with the with the system so i'm not going to say it's in a holding pattern because people are doing stuff with it but i think we're still waiting for blue dragon to come out to really be the the project that like proves what it's capable of and kind of pushes it forward a bit so lots of exciting progress but it's not quite like at what i would call you know 1.0 yet wes tell me about the two dk64 recompiled uh so yeah this is what i was alluding to uh a bit ago which is one of the i mean the monkey's paw of it's easier than ever to port a retro game to a modern pc is well what if you just threw uh something like the n64 recompiled framework and a game rom at claude and said port this game to my computer please uh and then 500 in tokens later you have a maybe semi-functional uh port of a game that sir i think you mean $20 a month thank you that all of the programmers uh in the n64 recompiled discord are pointing at and going uh what the fuck is this slop basically oh no so so there's a slop scene and then there's a hand hand brew recomp scene yeah so there's been some drama around projects that pop up uh using you know claude or other ai coding you know i i don't want to say that these I think genuinely it's mostly just people who are really enthusiastic, right? They want to play one of these old games. They either don't have the programming skills or maybe they do, but they don't have the time or the inclination to spend, you know, months and months of their life doing this by hand. They're excited about AI. They're just trying to see if it can work. And it does. Just vibing, bro. Just vibing. Exactly. And it can do some stuff. It can get you a somewhat playable, maybe even eventually quite polished, you know, version of one of these ports. But the I wrote a story on PC Gamer that when you're listening to this will have been up for a few days talking to quite a few developers in this scene who are staunchly against AI, basically. And they have quite a few arguments against the vibe coding process for doing a whole port. And like the big ones are kind of long term maintainability and tech debt. If you don't really understand your code, it's going to be very hard for other people to understand it. The way the AI organizes it is not going to be easy for another person to understand. That means fewer people are going to contribute to the project. It means you might not be able to bug fix it yourself because you don't know what it's doing, which means you have to pay more money and more tokens every time you're trying to fix stuff. um and that's all before you get into the ethical environmental issues of using it right well but also fundamentally like this isn't getting the feel right of the game requires a little bit of back and forth and and like like those algorithms those functions working the way they worked on the on the old hardware just on the on the modern hardware right yeah and so there's the the kind of disappointing thing, tricky thing with it is like, I want to champion these things when I see a new one and lots of people want to write headlines about them. Definitely want to make YouTube videos about them. But a lot of times that coverage is coming out when someone goes, Oh, I'm doing a recomp of X game And then a YouTube video comes out they play the first 15 minutes of it The game runs you know it maybe has a few little bugs here and there but like these games are you know dozens of hours long potentially so many little things can be inaccurate. You could be crashes in so many places along the way. So it's very easy to kind of have the illusion of one of these projects working. That doesn't necessarily mean it works all the way through or it might work, but it still has all those problems under the surface that I was was talking about right i mean this was the experience with emulation 20 years ago too right like in it you know when i remember you wrote an article about beastness on tested 100 years ago now um which was like hey here we want a uh you know a code path perfect path through the snes emulation right yeah um that handles the entire thing and and it was feature complete and they were like okay well we're done with this we're gonna look at this again and i don't think that ended up being true in retrospect but but the point is like there's always there's always edges that need to be kind of fixed and filed off and and repaired especially in the early days on this stuff so yeah not being able to work on that code seems like a problem so the the dk64 thing you're referencing someone started a dk64 recompilation there were a couple youtube videos about it And the folks who had worked on the DK64 randomizer for years who are very passionate about the game, know it inside and out, got a look at the code and basically went, all hell no. We're not going to let this be the project for DK64. So they started their own. They are working with someone who's done some other recompilation stuff. They know the game from working on the decompilation and ROM hacking it. And so they put out an announcement trailer that like explicitly, you know, partway through the trailer has, you know, some text on screen that's just like, no, you know, we are not using AI, like no AI in this project. And when they announced it in the Discord, they said so in very passionate terms. I mean, look, I get it. It's yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we talked a little bit about decompilation too, which I think is equally like this is, this is a more straightforward thing that's existed for a really long time where you just take existing executables and turn them into code through a series of automatic and manual processes. Is that, is that fair? Yeah. I don't, I don't really know much about the specifics of the automatic and or manual processes other than i think the thing that has really accelerated decompilations popping up like crazy in the last few years is the program gidra which i'm not sure if you're familiar it was developed by the nsa um oh yeah that nsa um and now it is an open source piece of software that people use to hack games which is a really weird thing is it named after the monster from Godzilla? I think so. Unless Ghidra itself comes from a... or that's Ghidorah, right? Isn't that the king? King Ghidorah. Yeah, this is like... Take a couple of vowels out of there. But I feel like that might be... that name might come from a you know, fantastical beast or something. I don't know. Maybe not. Maybe they just made it up. It's very similar to Ghidorah. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some commonality there. Yeah, probably they just took a couple of letters out because that's what decompiling is all about. Yeah, I'm looking it up. They don't have a name. I hesitate to click on it, but I'm going to click on the NSA page about this. And it's just a GitHub link, actually. What a perfect honeypot, right? Oh, you want to hack software, huh? Oh, yeah. Let me go to the NSA. Oh, NSA.gov slash Ghidra just redirects to the to the github so yeah and they don't they don't have um they don't have a name this like america's army before it is a is a honeypot for if hey if you're a u.s citizen and like projects like this consider applying to work for the nsa great i think everybody i think gudra is like uh it's like the power toys uh of the nsa it's like oh you made one you did one good thing like you've you've destroyed a lot of stuff but hey you made this one great piece of software well done if you let me tell you if you imply that power toys might be the only good piece of software microsoft's made in the last 20 years people get real upset with you okay so so the decompiles though like this is happening with newer games right we're looking at games from like the game cube and we generations and on this category yeah i would say older ones too i know folks in like the fan translation scene use it to hack like ps1 games for example um it might be kind of diminishing returns of necessity once you get into older stuff that's just like done in in assembly i'm not sure if it's i i know people use it for like super nintendo and stuff but i don't know if it's as as useful or like necessary for those older systems but i think for the more complex games uh it's it's a very effective piece of software and and uh let's see yeah on this list you have twilight princess for both twilight princess sports it was a cross-gen for folks who don't remember it was out on gamecube and wii is that right it was like yes the early zelda for wii and yeah that's exciting i i want i want a wind waker i want a wind waker i realize that that's a well emulated game at this point but i still want a wind waker it is currently 71 decompiled oh cool So you might only be a couple years away from a port of Wind Waker. Well, there we go. But yeah, Twilight Princess was a weird case where it had been decompiled for a good while and there wasn't a port of it yet. And then two independent projects started working on ports of it. And I think one of them kind of announced and went public first and was getting a lot of hype. And then the other one kind of just came out of the dark and was just like, hey, ours is done. Check it out. Like it's out now. So which one did they do? The Wii version? Did they do the GameCube version? They're both the GameCube version, I believe. Because of the controllers, the no waggle version of the game, basically. Yeah, I'm honestly not sure why they picked that one. It might be for that simple of a reason. It might be because there's something with the Wii code that's a bit harder to work with. Or, yeah, I'm honestly not sure. They might just really like left-handed Link. Yeah, everybody knows that Link is canonically left-handed. That's, you know, nobody buys a right-handed Link. Sonic Advance, a game that people are literally beating down. Is that one of the Capcom ones, or is that a different? I think it was made by Dimps, if I remember right. Okay. It was not in-house Sega, but it was some well-known developer, outsourcer. And the advance there indicates GBA, right? Correct. Okay. So yeah, somebody's working on the comps of the first two Sonic Advance games, and I think the third one is planned as well. I don't remember which of those is the best. I think I owned the first one, but people really like Sonic Advance 2, I think. um yeah maybe exciting don't trust sonic fans there's a sonic fan for every sonic game right i don't know why it's true distinguishing um minish cap is a personal favorite of mine so that's that's exciting to see on the list hell of a game yeah that one's in progress um and then there's some that you can just you can play right now the jack and daxter series um for the ps2 all three of those uh i believe are now playable um legend of dragoon for the ps1 one of those kind of i feel silly calling it a lost rpg but you know an rpg that never got a sequel never got any kind of like remaster or anything um yeah cool um anything else we want to hit on this i think we've hit the high points here there's a lot going on um yeah i mean you can you can go on my site on read only memo i have a page where i'm tracking a fair number of these I've mostly focused on the ones that are playable right now. And I'm kind of currently working through in my head how I want to proceed as more and more AI vibe coded projects come out. It's it can be a bit hard to distinguish between the ones that, you know, the developer may be like used a bit of AI in the process for bug fixing, blah, blah, blah. versus like it being a fully vibe coded thing that's never going to actually be as good and stable as you know you would like it to be so yeah trying to kind of trying to figure out how i want to caveat those or you know do i want to delete them all together um i i want to have a good central page that tells you which ones you can play um but it's just a bit it's a bit messy right now so i'm kind of working through that like you you kind of want just the good ones right you want the ones that are just that are clean um do people change the way the save mechanisms work because it's like this was a particularly punishing error for save mechanisms or is that outside the scope of these generally uh you know that's a good question i'm trying to think have any of them implemented like save state kind of functionality i don't think so but i could be wrong okay um yeah i'm not sure that that is one thing you definitely get with an emulator right because you can just save the entire, you know, everything that's going on into memory. I'm not sure if that is a thing with any of these recomps. Okay. Well, worth looking into. So you have the page, that page is on your read-only memo site. Yeah. I try to update it every month. And there are other lists too. If you go to decomp.dev, that is a huge tracker of GitHub projects, specifically of decompilations. So just because something's on this list doesn't mean it is going to get a port. But if you see something on this list that is at, you know, 99 or 100 percent completion, there's a decent chance that once it's done, someone else will, you know, take up the torch of doing a port for it or doing a recompilation or something like that. So that's sort of your like what to look forward to page. Or if you really like the problem solving of matching functions in a game, you can get involved in one. Cool. Okay, so next up, we want to talk about Mr. Stuff. Just a quick run through what's going on in the Mr. I'll lead off, I guess. months and months ago I asked the community if there was a way to play the saves from my mister on my steam deck using retro retro arc or whatever emu deck whatever and there was a project released earlier this week like four or five days ago and I'm finding the thread so I can shout out the person who recommended it because that was it was awesome that they did that um it was from j jper415 in the discord uh there's a thing called the mr retroarch save sync uh it's by github user wani wick j-u-a-n-i-w-c-k um i'll post the link in the show notes but basically it's a docker container that you put on your network someplace where you can see both your mr saves and your uh your retroarch save folder like a web dev folder that you that you connect retroarch and when one one changes on one side it automatically does the the type it's like usually it's like a little bit of bit changes that have to happen there's a there's a website you can use to do this as well um just to be clear but this does it automatically and it just runs them through when you make a new one so i set it up it took a little bit of finagling smb samba permissions and sift stuff and stuff like that on the machine that runs docker but the the tldr i also i also had done some crimes when i set up the mister because i have i have i have it connecting to a samba share on my network to pull roms so when i want to do when i want to put roms on i don't read them off of the sd card they're just on a you know it's like a two gig sd card on the device and then everything's just running off the nas in the other room because i never use the mister anywhere but in the house so i had to make sure that my saves were accessible on the network and jump through some hoops but i got there the point is i loaded up minish cap last night i played a little bit on the mr on the crt in my office and then i saved i got to a save spot or i think that game just has in place saves i hit the save button and i turned off the mr and i went back and i opened up my steam deck and i connected it to the retroarch share uh save save share and it just launched and it had my save from the from the mister right there now it's only saves it doesn't do save states save states are different and more complicated probably never going to work because that's like the contents of memory right but the saves work and it's rad and i intend to use this on pcs the steam machine all the machines in the house are going to get this once i lock down the setup so Yeah, that sounds super cool. With on the process on on either end, when you're like picking up your process or picking up from where you're paused. What is the like make sure you're loading the fresh save process? Is it manual? Fingers crossed, baby. Look, but you just turn it on and you have to hit a like sync button in the UI or. No, because it's because I'm saving the shit. The saves are saved on my NAS. so and i'm accessing i'm not doing like i think the probably the same way if you take your machines outside the house and want to play with them outside the same thing to do is to set up one of the sync utilities like sync thing or something like that and have it just grab the latest one when there's a change and have it running in the background um which if i took my steam deck outside of the house more often and was going to play old games when i was outside of the house that is probably what i would do but realistically like there's a hint and and like this doesn't solve the problem with like playing punch out on an lcd where the where the latency of the emulation is just slow and it's too hard to like punch out you can't i i can't play punch out on lcd i have to play some punch out on the crt right um but it does it does give me a way to play like rpg i tried playing zelda 2 the adventure of link on the steam deck and immediately stopped because i was like this is gonna make me crazy the timing on this is too too hard um but like minish cap was great uh link to the past was fine uh stuff like that so i mean it's really cool to have the you're you're just you're kind of like turning the game into the game no matter where you're playing it right yeah like there there is not necessarily a functional distinction between your ability to play it in bed on your Steam Deck or at the PC or, you know, on wherever you have your mister in the living room, right? Well, the mister is actually three feet to the left. So if I want to play the mister games, I just sit in my office for even more hours a day. It turns out I was just trying to think of another room. Well, you go to at least three rooms in your house, right? I have four. I have a bathroom that I use sometimes too. So, but that's a separate deck territory separate handheld for the bathroom well why do you think i have two crts the second one's just in there i'm gonna put up in the corner and get it real steamy that's probably good for him right um perfect so yeah i'll put the i'll put the link to that in the show notes but but uh thanks to japer for pointing that out because i would have missed it would have been months before i saw it and there's a couple of other similar projects going this is the first one that's shipped to full disclosure the documentation looks like it was written by ai because it definitely has the recommended path and all the the kind of the kind of claude-esque notation yeah i'm looking i'm looking at it now and claude.md is in the git ignore which means yep there's some claude uh involved here yeah but yeah hey if if it works and it's simple enough um i really appreciate the framing of it that you you can use it kind of with whatever your current setup is like it's just telling you like we're giving you these two these two folders the save is going to be converted sync it however you want like yeah that's on you yeah do your own thing whatever works for you that's cool yeah it's pretty good um you've been fooling around with mr ui stuff though which i'm super interested in because i'm using the the original ui like some sort of mr caveman yeah so i'm i'm something of a a mr neophyte like you you and brad have been you know using them and talking about it for for years and i've like followed the scene quite a bit by reporting on you know developments for the cores like i've talked to the developer of the ps1 and n64 core and some other people but i never like invested in buying one because i was like well i'm mostly doing software emulation i like software emulators just fine i only have so much time to actually play retro games so it's really not until the superstation was coming out that i was like okay this is going to be when i like really get into using the mr more and i was kind of holding out for the ui that was i think originally probably meant to launch with the superstation but taki udon has just been working on it for a really long time and it's still in beta so all of a sudden the superstation is the mr the kind of 99 mr clone uh so yeah i should specify So Taki Udon is a YouTuber who worked on, did a bunch of YouTube videos around like different retro handhelds, lots of like really good reviews. And he got, he lives in China and he got into working in the mystery scene after basically getting fed up with how much like the DE10 nano cost. He was looking at it and he's like, I work in and around like manufacturing and industrial design and like this thing should not cost as much. So he launched the Mr. Pi, which is what you're talking about. It's just like a clone board, basically, of the D10 Nano does all of the stuff that the Mr. would do. It is just a Mr. basically with some very mild tweaks, like a different power, you know, USB-C for power. I think some stuff like that. Does it work with the Mr. the existing ecosystem of Mr. Hats and stuff like that? Like the USB board and the IO boards and stuff I think it almost all compatible I think there were like a couple things that he changed layout wise for reasons like i think this will be better um that like broke compatibility with like a little bit of stuff but like it it mostly works okay with all of that ecosystem so that was the mr pie that was his kind of first step into this territory uh he kind of got some cred from doing that got some seed money i guess from people buying it and then he launched the superstation one which is also just a mr board in terms of its like fpga capabilities but it's in a shell meant to look like the ps1 one the kind of last model of the ps1 that's this very rounded sleek design uh that's like his personal favorite he loved that that design uh and the superstation one is like a mister paired with a very good video board that can just do like all of the outputs that you would want basically so you've got your rgb and your bga and your scart and and all of that stuff that's awesome yeah and it's like relatively affordable um compared to like an analog uh device for example so it's like 210 now for the superstation one i'm pretty sure it launched cheaper than that initially but like you and i know that hardware stuff and tariff stuff has been insane the last couple years right so yeah the world's a nightmare right now we don't need to yeah i don't think we need to explain why again we've talked about it a lot so anyway he shipped this thing um this year maybe it was a very tail end of last year when they stopped started shipping out um and getting in people's hands now and part of the pitch for it was he was going to do a Mr. UI that was going to be nice and graphical and put a ton of engineering work into it. And basically it was like, people said it couldn't be done, but it turns out, you know, no one just wanted to take on this bitch of a task to do it. So he's still been working on that, but then somewhat out of nowhere, at least to me, maybe I just wasn't following this side of the seen uh the folks who work on zaparu which is the really cool mr launcher system where you can like use nfc cards and stuff to launch games um they put out a front end for the mr and it is very oh similar in function to the what haki udon's been working on aesthetically somewhat different um but yeah basically you boot up your mr and instead of having that you know ascii art is would you call it ascii art ui just like it's not even art it's just text it's a test it's like a text mode interface almost yeah exactly yeah um you have a kind of i guess like modern big picture ui is the right way to describe it like kind of big chunky icons on a grid layout um pretty simple to use uh when you boot into a core and then you you know hold down the button to like go to the menu it has a entry now in the mr menu to just hop back to that front end so it's pretty easy to to get back to it you don't get like stuck in the mr ui um and yeah it's just it it makes it a lot closer to the experience someone would get from a more bespoke system like an analog system or you know a retro arch ui something like that um you're definitely still on a mister there are some of those kind of like hardcore user you know pointy edges um but it it is all of a sudden a device that you could like theoretically give to someone who's not very tech savvy and they would be okay navigating it you can still choose your audio chip you want on your genesis though i assume right i i don't think it hides any functionality okay the mister has um i'm not sure if everything is surfaced in the zapro front end currently um but i think i think if you could do it on the mister worst case you would have to like boot up the game and then pull up the mystery ui and do it that way um but i think all of the stuff you would expect to be accessible is accessible via the ui Have you have you spent time with either of these yet? I spent some time with the Zapro one. Haki's UI, I used like one of the earliest beta releases for it, and it was just not ready for like non-testing use. Basically, had some crashing issues. It had like you couldn't do update all basically because that would pull files that his UI was modifying and that would that would break it. I think that's he's since like change that and fix that. And it's getting like really close to, I think, still a beta release, but like a public beta that anybody can use. But I basically spent a few hours messing with that one and then was like, I'm going to wait until I can. The experience that I'm having is like something I can write about, basically, because it was just too early, really, to to to put in my newsletter. So I was just like, OK, I'll like chill on that one. And then the Zappary one came out. So yeah, I've been messing around with it a little bit. Seems really easy to use. I like it a lot. It's not like the most beautiful opinionated UI you've ever seen. Like it feels pretty conventional as a big picture UI, but I think they're quite limited in terms of what you can do on the mister, like what the FPGA is capable of running, you know, performantly. um the one thing i haven't figured out yet using it is so all the artwork loads in really slow for me um the stuff that i scraped and i'm not sure if it's what combination of the mister being underpowered the ui being the front end just being like too slow image caching the image files maybe being too big having too many games on there my micro sd card not being fast enough the super stations sd card reading not being fast like there's so many elements there that i haven't really had time to you know process of elimination go through um but right now it's like it's so slow to scroll through the ui uh and get the art to load that i'm almost just like i don't i don't even want the art if it's going to take seven seconds to load in an image okay look let me tell you you need to buy a bunch of little mini like capsule style uh ness and snes cartridges you need to buy a big giant bag of nfc stickers and then you need to program those nfc stickers and get the thing and also this is important you need to buy a uv printer so if they're kind of expensive it's 2500 bucks but it's totally worth it and you're going to buy that so you can print the labels on the cartridges and then you're going to have a perfect thing and also i'm going to have to borrow your uv printer for a couple hours uh no reason i yeah i see uh maybe where you're going with this plan i think it's a great plan it's a great plan for you yeah it's a fantastic plan you're gonna love it you're gonna have such nice looking cartridges it's gonna be fabulous i i do think those are legitimately sick i've seen the ones that steve kim has posted on on blue sky um super cool yeah uh but yeah it's it's cool that the zapparoo front end it like works with that stuff and integrates with it but that's a totally optional venture right like you can just use this as a ui and it is perfectly standalone um look i if i i sent my wife a link to one of those videos and she's like that's really cool you're absolutely not buying one of those printers she immediately sussed me out so um you were trying to stealth in the reason oh if we could do this if only we had the printer look how cool you could play you could play frogger anytime you want it'll be really easy you don't have to deal with the stupid mr menu no it'll take three seconds yeah you just tap it And it's like, it's so easy. I mean, you also, I want to talk about Mr. Companion because this is a thing I didn't know about. Yeah, this I think would maybe interest more people in the Mr. Scene than the UI. Because if you're just like, I'm good with the, you know, I'm used to the Mr. UI. I don't need, I don't need a graphical interface. Mr. Companion is a super useful app that I thought it had been around for longer than it maybe has. but it's been, um, the updates are coming in for it at an incredibly rapid pace. Uh, like I thought, I thought I had somehow done something wrong when I was looking at, I like was looking at an article on retro RGB and they were using like Mr. Companion version, like 6.4 or something. And I was like, wait, I downloaded this and mine is like version, like two point something. Did I, did I somehow download like you know a version from years ago no it just turns out this thing has been coming along like crazy just since february of this year that's wild i just downloaded like a couple months ago and it has transformed in that time um so it's basically just an app that you open on your computer and you can connect to your mister over you know over wi-fi or however you have it networked in and just do a lot of the maintenance stuff and like installing stuff that would just be more tedious to do from the system so it has a whole interface for scraping all of your metadata and artwork and stuff and loading that on your sd card you can connect to it wirelessly and then just say like install zaparu install zaparu front end you know run update all install somebody's like wallpaper pack um it's got kind of a little like app library on it now um yeah it's really really handy it connects with ssh and sftp so you can even use it to like load roms and stuff like that if that's your jam um i'm gonna install this they have linux mac and windows versions so everybody's covered really seems really incredibly useful because yeah it's great i am generally like i update the mr every year probably whether it needs it or not and i feel like i'm missing out on some stuff but also the games i play generally work at this point so it's okay it has a save manager built in i haven't messed with that but you can also see all of your zap scripts on there and and modify those so yeah anytime i guess you've found yourself like hauling files back and forth on the sd card or plugging a keyboard into your mister because you need to type something in like this once you have this up and running it should pretty much make it so you don't have to do any of that anymore look i gotta tell you once you get the SSH pipe hooked up. It's, it's pretty nice if you love a terminal, but if not, then I get that. So let me, can I ask you a philosophical question before we, before we close out here, Wes? Shoot. Okay. So on my mister, I did the thing where I hooked up to the NAS and then I put in, look, platform owners, cover your ears for a second. We're past the 30 minute point of the podcast. It's fine. I just put complete ROM sets for the platforms that I was interested in on the on the nas and it's kind of a it's kind of not a great experience right because it's like there's a thousand games in there that i don't want to play in like 20 that i do generally at any given moment yeah um like what's your is is there is this a conversation in the scene is this something that i'm hitting because i'm old and i i have a hard time navigating large menus full of games like what like what's the solution for this first of all i want to say if you're a cop you have to tell us your cop before you download the episode look this is going to come out on shut the fuck up sunday okay uh so yeah no i i mean i don't i don't know if it's a conversation people have in emulation related discord servers or you know subreddits i think probably not in discord too much because those servers are like hardline against public piracy discussions because they are working on you know emulators they don't want to get nuked right so they're just like don't talk about it shut the fuck up do it in your dms we have a similar rule on our discord as well but i think it's it's a discussion i feel like i've had with everyone i've ever known who's into this kind of stuff right is the it's not even just emulation it's like netflix it's the streaming future it's having access to kind of unlimited you know hashtag content at any given time is how much of your brain space are you dedicating to just that that process of picking stuff and i think it does also put you in a position of like never wanting to commit to something uh because you're just like well i have this library it creates this like grazing mentality right so i think you're you should absolutely cut it down to a few dozen games or you know what whatever stuff that you want to curate uh that experience around i think is a better way to go so what i've done on the mister is just i have exclamation point exclamation point exclamation point a folder that starts with three exclamation points at the top of the thing that's like 10 or 15 games for each platform and that's narrowed it down to a place that is and the irony of course of this is that it's almost all games that i actually own physical copies of and they're just sitting in the garage and i don't i can't be asked to get the old hardware out yeah um so anyway um okay fascinating i i would like to hear from um you know folks uh tech pod listeners who are mr owners and use the mr uh if they have a setup similar to yours with the nas uh like i'm planning to set mine up that way but i just haven't done it yet but i am curious if there's a you know agreed upon or a method people would vouch for for like having access to your whole library of games but not making that your default experience right like maybe it is you just have a starred folder and that's where that stuff goes um but it's it's sort of nice to know like i have the archives there i can dig into them if i want to but is there a better way to just curate your experience down to a handful of games other than like i'm gonna just copy these onto the sd card and you know have have that manual process every time i want to put you know five new games on there like that doesn't feel like the best solution but i want something that's not well point it to a folder of you know 10 000 games or whatever yeah the folder well it's even worse than that because like my stuff is all set up where the because there's a file limit for the folders so you have to like have multiple like the snes has five folders or something ridiculous so it's like a through g and h through m and then just s is there all by itself and and part of this was that i don't know if this is still the case but in the early days of the mister you needed specific versions of roms in order for it to work i think it's gotten a little bit more flexible now um so like even like i do have a retron here i have pulled my old roms and pulled my old saves and stuff off and some of that stuff didn't work because i didn't have the right like the right bits at the front of the rom files or whatever like the headers yeah yeah yeah so um anyway it's interesting this is this is um this has been a fascinating conversation as always wes i i always love coming on getting to talk to you about this stuff because it's it's fun to to get to borrow your expertise for an hour or so and talk about it um yeah thanks so much for having me on it was a treat i can't believe that was that hour just like flew by holy crap uh what uh what where people find you what's the best piece people can find you yeah you can find me on blue sky uh west.readonlymemo.com is my handle on there uh and you can find me at readonlymemo.com that's my newsletter and i'm on pc gamer all the time uh lots of other people on pc gamer so you'd have to dig dig around to find my stuff but i'm there behind the scenes editing and and uh organizing and scheming and stuff every day too i did enjoy your did you write the scene drama donkey kong 64 poster was that someone else yep that was me yeah i enjoyed that i i love you know i you know how i love about scene drama and that one sounded sounded juicy so people should check that out too go read it if only to be blessed by a screen cap from the donkey kong country tv show that I thought fit the subject very well. It seemed apropos. Thank you, as always, to Wes. It's always a pleasure to have you on the show. And if you don't already subscribe to Read Only Memo, go do it. It's free. It comes out every other week. I learn something every single time that one of Wes's newsletters hits my inbox. And I highly encourage anybody who likes playing an occasional old game to check it out. Now, we've reached the part of the show where I thank everyone for supporting the show because we are listener supported. We wouldn't be here without you, the listener, which means if you would like to find out how you can support the show, you go to patreon.com slash techpod, where for as little as five bucks a month, you get access to the discord, which is full of a bunch of beautiful nerds who talk about interesting stuff all the time. You can also get access to our monthly patron exclusive episode. Last month, I just sat down in front of the microphone and answered a whole bunch of questions that people had sent in. It was actually a lot of fun and people seemed to enjoy that as well. So again, it's patreon.com slash techpod. It's $5 a month. That's $5. And you too can find out how to get access to that by going to patreon.com slash techpod. This is also the part of the show where we thank our executive producer to your patrons, including In Felicitous Rips, Jordan Lippet, Octothorpe Funny Fiend, David Allen, and James Kamek. Thank you also so much. Thanks to everyone who supports the show. We appreciate each and every one of you, and we will see you next week with another edition of the TechPod. As always, please consider the environment before printing this podcast. We'll be right back. you