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superfamicom

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https://sfc.fm

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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.

https://www.retrotink.com/shop/retrotink-4k

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.

https://github.com/uttori/uttori-image-png

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.

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

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.

https://wiki.superfamicom.org/

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.

https://sfc.fm/

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.

On macOS this can be really useful, change the current terminal to the top most folder in Finder, do not recall where it came from:

  # Change to the Front Folder open in Finder
  function ff {
    osascript -e 'tell application "Finder"'\
    -e 'if (0 < (count Finder windows)) then'\
    -e 'set finderpath to get target of the front window as alias'\
    -e 'else'\
    -e 'set finderpath to get desktop as alias'\
    -e 'end if'\
    -e 'get POSIX path of finderpath'\
    -e 'end tell';};\
  function cdff { cd "`ff $@`" || exit; };

It seems odd to go out of the way to not break older libraries like mootools by renaming built in functions only to now break all older parsers for hints that don't convert to any performance improvement. I love the idea, and use JSDoc comments for that exact reason, but it feels inconsistent.

I'm sorry you had so many less than awesome teachers. I had an Algebra 1 teacher in middle school (United States) that really made a huge difference. The way she taught was so different than every other teach I had up until that point. She approached everything in a meaningful and useful way. It really set me up for success then and now.

The article seems more against manual dubbing and related difficulties than actual subtitles. The best subtitles I've seen included relevant context on cultural jokes I would have completely missed had there not been explanation text. One example would be recently while watching a Korean drama with dubs that didn't address cultural items and beauty standard, the content itself came off very differently than the intention seemed.

If anyone else was curious and wanted to extract the samples to a usable format you can extract the contents with the repo linked in the article, convert with the other tool linked and finally convert from PCM to WAV with ffmpeg:

  node bin/extract-samples.js sf2ua

  for f in *.vox; do echo "Processing $f file.."; ./adpcm/adpcm od "$f" "$f.pcm"; ffmpeg -f s16le -ar 8000 -ac 1 -i "$f.pcm" -ar 44100 -ac 2 "$f.wav"; done

I have a home in Nashville, Tennessee but chose to move to Seattle, Washington for work (software engineering), but stay here for the access to everyday life improvements- restaurant variety, activities, etc. Nashville has grown a lot, but you are still car dependent and the Conservative values run deep there, though those folks are being displaced as the housing market continues to boom which makes them more hostile to outsiders than they already were.

I live in the US and had my debit card (number only, one of the bigger data leaks) stolen years ago and ever since then my bank will check every purchase with me over $300. It was really frustrating for years until someone else took my card (from another data leak) and was easily stopped and new card issued. I cannot imagine someone selling my home without involving me, or at the very least without several other of my personal contact methods also compromised at the same time.