Resurrecting the SDVX monthly events at my local arcade to start off 2026. Organized these for a while back in 2023 until I ran out of motivation. It's pretty much the only thing I've been working on for the last 2 weeks, so I felt obliged to write up some of my thoughts on the whole thing.

Presenting a new way to share your scores.

First time I've added support for passkeys to a project.

Finished switching our in-house cabinet streams over to WebRTC. Latency is now down to under a second!

6 years since the last time I had to build something with XP compatibility. Had a much nicer experience this time around, thanks to w64devkit. Aside from a single patch to replace WSAPoll, all my fancy modern stuff (GCC 15.2, vcpkg) has worked just fine.

Worked on a lot of things for REPLAY last week. IIDX & SDVX recordings now include markers on the timeline, as well as embedded in the video file as chapters. Support for other games should be coming in the near future. This new approach is a lot more reliable than the old audio fingerprinting one.

Open sourced my old multi-hack for IIDX, featuring some of the worst C++ I've ever written.

Haven't been subscribed since October, but felt the itch to play again last month. I think I got a bit carried away...

Thanks to everyone who participated in the VEGA Q2 collaboration videos. Here's the first one for IIDX! SDVX & DDR up next.

One more generation of Lain hardware. From mechanical, to optical, and now magnetic switches.

Now running my Pi Zero 2 W as a CD player & Bluetooth A2DP sink. Detects disc insertion via udev and runs a script. Uses cd-discid to look up metadata, creates a playlist for it and automatically loads it into mpd.

Not sure if it's in a release yet, but I just noticed that OBS Studio has native ARM64 support on Windows. Briefly tested on my 2018 phone and it can easily do 1080p60 using software encoding.

Currently writing a library loader to play around with Windows on ARM. It can inject into other ARM64 processes, emulated x86 processes, but the shellcode was crashing in emulated x64 processes. Turns out system libraries have two sets of exports and I had been reading from the wrong one.

My gauge shift hack for IIDX INFINITAS is open source now. It's about 5 years of accumulated jank, but hopefully someone will have some fun with it.

I also managed to (somehow) trigger thousands of packages to be rebuilt while working on my first vcpkg port. Still not sure how that happened... but it got merged today! 🥳

Made the switch from MSVC to MSYS2 Clang for new projects. Now that I have a sane package manager for dependencies I've been having a lot of fun learning more about CMake install rules & making PKGBUILDs for a few missing libraries.

Stumbled across the auto play code in INFINITAS while looking for something else. Not aware of anything that uses this, so maybe it's just a leftover from the old 2015 trial mode client. Not sure why the game is restricted to 60fps when run in a window, but it's easily bypassed with a 2 byte patch.

On a train with no signal and nothing to read but the mpv manual page cached in my browser, I learned that wrapping options between --{ and --} applies them on a per-file basis. Now using it with my Blu-ray playback scripts to play the whole disc with a single command. Command is a little unwieldy.

Finished working on a CI script to build libbluray & ffmpeg with my hacked up custom patches. Posted a couple of issues I found with @msys2org.bsky.social along the way, all of which were fixed within a day. Much love to their team for making development on Windows an enjoyable experience.

After writing some patches for libbluray & ffmpeg, I think I've finally "solved" my Blu-ray playback issues without using any non-free software or platform-specific workarounds. Here it is playing on my Windows 11 ARM64 phone, which also compiled (after 2 hours) the build of FFmpeg used here.

Minor Windows annoyance of the day: inconsistent context menu items between a directory & the same directory but accessed through a library (with a single location in it)

Seems like I've found a bug with FFmpeg while looking for workarounds to a bug in mpv. I'm starting to understand why people rip their Blu-ray discs instead of playing them.

RANDOM/R-RANDOM column arrangements have been included in fervidex.net scores since 2021. I've started working on extending that to S-RANDOM as well. The current implementation works by storing the column for each note. Here's a demo of it saving two different S-RANDOMs to disk in INFINITAS.

Managed to play my physical Blu-ray copy. Had to build libaacs from source and install MakeMKV to decrypt and play it in mpv. The original yellow subtitles on the disc were kind of ugly, so I extracted the fonts and script from the AK-Submarines release instead, which syncs up with a 22.8sec~ delay.

Happy New Year!

Bought a few DVD/BDs from Japan, so I should probably figure out whether I need to worry about region locking or not. From what I can tell, DVD can be bypassed with libdvdcss - meaning no need to switch drive region, and Blu-ray enforcement is on the software level, so also nothing to worry about?

It's server storage upgrade day, followed by half a day of copying everything back from the old drives.

Update: it works.

Yesterday, I released my initial attempt at integrating TextAge chart viewer links into Fervidex. Combined with webhook posting from the result screen, it's a very convenient way to review random sequences. Tracked randoms from other players are also now linked directly from the leaderboard page.

At some point, perhaps around Windows 8 if memory serves, dragging the Recycle Bin to the bottom-right corner using small icons would always fail on the first attempt. I recorded this video in 2019 but it still happens in 24H2. These are the things that keep me up at night.

Finished off a little side-project to distract me from my other projects. It's a Wi-Fi audio CD player that encodes and streams FLAC to a local Icecast server. It can optionally re-encode to Opus and broadcast to a Discord voice channel as well.

Between my long breaks from using Linux on the desktop, it's always nice to come back and see how things have improved. I wish getting LDAC audio to work on Windows was this easy.

Recently had an issue with an arcade cabinet that randomly started crashing to desktop after a game update. From reviewing our replay buffer we found that it never happened during gameplay - only on scene transitions. Could take anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours before it would happen.

First day of the 2024 London Q4 Rhythm Game Meetup

Installed Linux on a whim to try out GPU passthrough with a laptop. The setup process is rather involved, but performs almost natively once it's all configured. The Looking Glass client feels especially great to use with how seamlessly the various input integrations work.

Twitter followers might remember that INFINITAS chart navigation feature I posted about back in June. It's now properly implemented and usable with the Fervidex preview client. Likely to be merged into stable whenever the game is next updated.

Experimenting with systemd socket activation. Didn't want to deal with sockets in my project, so I'm using ncat in listen mode to forward stdout over the network. Works really well.

Wrote a script to notify me when an update to INFINITAS is released so I can do some basic compatibility testing for Fervidex. Now eagerly awaiting an update to see if it'll actually do anything.

First time using usbipd-win today, passing through a CD drive to WSL. Didn't work correctly at first but updating the kernel to 6.6 and installing modules appeared to fix it. Drive is from my latest AliExpress order. Nothing special about it other than the enclosure, which is very cool to look at.

Couple more upgrades for the trusty ThinkPad P52 - Wi-Fi 6 network card & a new 2560x1440 165Hz screen.

Posting a week late, but visited the legendary @gatchamix.com homecade in Bristol once again. Going from 1P IIDX to 2P 5-key always makes me feel like I'm playing the game again for the first time.

Bought two second-hand X540-T2s to try out 10Gbps networking at home. Results were better than expected from some brief testing, but the fans are unusable on both cards. Eager to install these again when the replacements arrive.