While in Japan, I noticed lots of prices rose since last year. Example: my favourite plum liqueur - Kaga Umeshu - went from 1580 yen to 1980 yen. But the sublime 5-year aged version rose from 3180 to 5500 yen, probably because it has been winning awards. www.shop-manzairaku.jp/products/?id...

Knowing that: -RAM and storage prices are soaring -Apple hadn't increased their prices on these yet, and -Apple was planning a release this week ...I ordered a Macbook to "beat the increase". Instead, while they increased the base price, they also increased storage, making the config LESS expensive.

Not dead yet! Just been busy with other things :P Here's a miniboss I'm working on for Special Ninja Squad. Featuring a bike chase because I listen to you guys :P I should have most of the assets now. Just need to draw a few extra tiles and off to implementation! #pcengine #gamedev #turbografx

Got a new piece here everyone can read on PC-FX exclusive Last Imperial Prince! Screenshots are sure to prompt nostalgic feelings of time spent gazing at screenshots of niche, unattainable Japanese RPGs - just make sure you don't actually play it: kimimithegameeatingshemonster.com/2026/03/02/l...

Starbucks Japan is an entirely different place than North America. I quite enjoy it.

Wrapping up the trip and heading home in a few hours. I can’t believe after all these years I had never tried a proper Ichigo Daifuku. They’re delicious !

this is a thing of beauty

Whoops, I missed my chance to make the “640% should be enough for everybody” joke. But it’s obviously not enough because the PicoIDE campaign keeps going. 6 days left! I’m blown away by how far it’s come. BTW the last update I posted brought even more people with weird systems out of the woodwork!

Checking out used videogames in Japan, the prices are even higher than I expected for the old ones like PC Engine/PC-FX. It seems to me that PS Vita is probably the "sweet spot" for pricing right now (though I'm not an expert on this system).

re @anthropic.com: I've identified industrial-scale copyright violations on my content by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, X, and more. These companies created thousands of crawlers incorporating the text of all my blog posts, open source code, and books into their paid AI models to profit exorbitantly.

I feel like this type of research will lead us closer to the age of Artificial Intelligence that people keep claiming has arrived (every 10-20 years or so). hackaday.com/2026/02/24/t...

With respect to my earlier AI comments, it seems clear that there are people with strong views on both sides; my point was less about whether it’s an interesting technology in a laboratory setting and more about people selling it as something that it fairly obviously is not.

I've been seeing more mania surrounding Claude and OpenClaw these past 2-3 weeks, and it just reminds me that all useful technological advancements since the beginnings of mathematics are based on predictable behaviours and repeatability. I'll take a look again when it has those two attributes.

"Anthropic Accuses Chinese Firms of Stealing Claude AI Data". I don't have any sympathy for companies who actively try to subvert copyright, argue (successfully) in courts that it doesn't afford such protection in their realm due to "transformation", and then cry that they aren't protected.

Popful Mail PC Engine CD complete video translation is up courtesy of @Forrealsyalls #Falcom #NEC #Hunex #PCEngine #TurboGrafx #TurboDuo #FanTranslation youtu.be/2ji4t2JCu7Y?...

NEW VIDEO: Samurai Shodown! Part 45 of our survey of Neo Geo games in order of catalog number. youtu.be/JuRqmjJWU4Y You can join the new Patreon to help me get the videos out faster: patreon.com/neoalec #neogeo #snk #16bit #retrogaming #arcade #classicgaming #fightinggames

Coolish of the day (yesterday). Concentrated mikan (orange). First mouthful seemed artificial, but after that it was pretty strong orange flavour. Not really like a Creamsicle, since the ice cream flavour was overpowered. Still, good and refreshing.

I have some PicoROMs back in stock. New 28-pin version and a revised 32-pin version. www.tindie.com/products/pbr...

Kitakyushu (Kokura station area) also has some nice manhole covers, including a whole series from Matsumoto Leiji’s works:

Today’s donut is from the Pompadour bakery in the basement of Izutsuya department store in Kitakyushu. Cinnamon sugar flavou, which is essentially extinct in Toronto now (I miss it). Surprisingly fresh donut, even though I bought it after lunch !

Coolish of the day. Plant-based milk vanilla. Pretty good, with a mild difference something like soy milk and/or almond milk. I wouldn’t have guessed it was plant-based if I didn’t know from the packaging.

Coolish of the day. Strong vanilla. Pretty good, but I really don’t notice it being much different from original vanilla.

A few more manhole covers before I leave Okayama:

Japan has an astounding array of citrus which really can’t be found anywhere else. Between cultivars, variants, and specific farms, there must be hundreds, in season now. I really suggest trying out a few if you can. The below are all orange-like:

Coolish of the day. Strong Belgian chocolate. Not my favourite, but I’m “Foolish for Coolish”, I guess.

I’ve been in Okayama for a few days, a city of about 750,000 people - big enough to have nice tjings, and small enough that it’s not crowded. Found a cute little shop that does homemade pies and feels like visiting somebody’s house. (“Pai no mise Martel”)

Coolish of the day. Luxurious Frappe Dark Mocha. Not bad, but a higher price point than normal Coolish. More chocolate flavour than coffee.

Coolish of the day. Whipped Cream flavour. Tastes like whipped cream… which is great at the start, but becomes too sweet before the end.

Coolish of the day. Coffee. Quite good !

As a Canadian who remembers when donuts in Toronto used to be made in-store, plentiful, cheap, and delicious, I feel like I’ll probably be more critical than most people about the current donut boom in Japan. I’ll be trying some out, and commenting. (A thread)

Wow, what happened to both Apple Maps and Google Maps for train directions in Tokyo ? They seem to be getting worse each time I come, and competing with each other for worst choices. From Akihabara to Nakano, the obvious choice is Sobu -> Chuo, but that didn’t even appear as an option…

I also tried one of the fruit daifuku from Kanadaya which has been getting lots of attention lately. Not bad, but definitely overhyped, and it’s a mess to eat. Next time I’ll go for traditional fruit daifuku.

I tried one of Sando Lab’s viral “agepan” (fried bread) sandwiches. The egg salad was very well seasoned, but I’m not sure it’s worth 100% of the hype. Try it, though.

​All Japan Women's Pro Wrestling Queen of Queens - English Translation (PCFX) Added

👋 just released the first public version of libjoybus, an open implementation of the Nintendo Joybus protocol used by N64 and GameCube controllers, with initial support for Pi Pico (1 and 2) and SiLabs Gecko microcontrollers: github.com/loopj/libjoy...

The PicoIDE Crowd Supply campaign is now live! Back the project to be among the first to get yours! PicoIDE is an open IDE/ATAPI drive emulator for retro systems. www.crowdsupply.com/polpotronics...

I did Hydlide 1 on PC-88 last year, so I'm afraid this was inevitable... Well, glad I survived anyway... youtu.be/wgOJ-ZxEFEc #hydlide #pc88 #nes #8bit #retrogaming #jrpg

Mmm... homemade butter tarts...

Finishing things up for #PicoIDE and it just about saturates the IDE bus in MWDMA mode 2. I’m pretty happy with this! It tests as fast as a 74x CD-rom drive which means there’s a bit more headroom in that mode but that could be the CPU on this K6-2 system being a bottleneck.

Built with spring contacts harvested from an off-the-shelf breadboard, these extra-wide models are tailored for bigger dev boards.

If you ever wanted to understand how much capacitance to use on the output of a switching power supply to reduce both ripple and voltage sag due to load, this article is for you. No need to be afraid of switching power supplies. hackaday.com/2026/01/18/c...

Just a reminder to everyone to pressure these folks to finish their extremely nice looking pc engine game. Kickstart it!!!

If you appreciate the work that goes into the articles on the site or the time and money it takes to make scans like the ones below, please considering showing your support! Thank you! www.patreon.com/SUDDENDESU

Here's a quick video on Stonks 9800 - a PC-98-inspired indie game available on Steam. youtu.be/vQI4xj1X8R8

Here's the schematic of the TC-8's EPROM board (for the TRS-80 Model 1). Notice the simplicity of the address decoder - it took me a few minutes to figure out that the selected range is $3000-$37BF .

Hmmm. www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/i...

"It Has To Happen Outside Of Japan" - Game Preservation Society Launches Patreon And Opens US Office Following Government Fund Freeze. (Image: @gamepres)

Several months ago, I designed a FRAM board for the PCE Shuttle Backup Memory Unit, and a friend tested it. I've been so busy, I just got a chance to update the GitHub repository with the board (sorry, no installation pictures). github.com/pce-devel/PC...

I was able to locate a tape with the UTIL program as well, and transferred it to my PC via WAV file into a CAS file. Although it's a different version, it's substantially similar. Maybe I should annotate a disassembly.