I got the DVDs for another show I haven't seen in at least five years: the TV series adaptation of From Dusk Till Dawn. It's a bit sluggish at first, picks up the pace in episode 4 and, all in all, it's even better than I remembered. And it's helmed by Robert Rodriguez who directed the original.

As an avid YouTube watcher, I don't think there's a single AI feature on there that I like. AI dubs are lifeless and sometimes activated by default. Translated AI titles and subtitles are hit-and-miss at best, and AI titles are inconsistently forced on me. I wish there was an option to disable AI.

Got a full DVD set of a show that completely went under my radar when it first came out: Veronica Mars. Great stuff, I marathoned the whole thing (+ movie, + revival). I guess if I was a longtime fan, invested in it for decades, I would've been furious at the ending too, but I thought it was solid.

This is what happens when two collision routines...erm... collide :) #Sonic8BitAdvance

And in the final hours of the following weekend, the bug has finally been resolved. My previous Eureka moment turned out to be bogus, by the way.

This is the last huge bug I need to fix before completing the Sonic 1 part of #Sonic8BitAdvance: something about slopes put against walls makes Sonic bounce back. For a while I had no idea what caused it, I just got the Eureka moment. Of course it had to happen in the final hours of the weekend...

The Steam Machine looks good, but I'm still curious to see how well it will fare against the competition Valve themselves helped create: PCs with Bazzite. Or whether it will come up with something unique to offer. I'm optimistic though. Valve knows what they're doing and the Steam Deck still rocks.

Man, I wish UT2004 got some love (and an OK from Epic to distribute it) too. But the original UT is still a great time too.

Randomly thought about that time when I reported a bug with Sonic Origins only to be told that, no, it was a bug with Sonic 3K that was fixed in Origins. But I can't help thinking that the original "bugged" behavior makes more sense than the "fixed" one. Sometimes keeping bugs in is a good thing.

While playtesting #Sonic8BitAdvance, I made a jump in Jungle Zone I thought was impossible. So I launched the original game to see how badly I messed up. To my surprise, this jump turned out to be, granted, harder to make but entirely possible. My own remake taught me something about the original.

Coins won't be a thing anymore in #Sonic8BitAdvance. I had plans for them that, while interesting to me, could end up becoming too intrusive and cumbersome. I had an idea of a shop of sorts where after winning, losing or quitting either game, the player would get a certain number of coins... (1/11)

I'm still amazed with the C++ framework for the GBA, Butano, that I'm using for Sonic 8-Bit Advance. They finally added the question "Is there any way to donate to Butano?" to their FAQ and the answer basically is... no. Bummer, I'd like to send them a few bucks though 😅.

As huge a Pokémon fan as I am, I'm still rooting for Palworld to win and for their victory to set a precedent. Nintendo makes great games, but as a company IMHO they do need a big slap in the face. I've played Palworld in early access and enjoyed it quite a lot. Now waiting for a stable release.

Heard on a podcast today that DS-like emulation consoles by Anbernic etc were a waste because "you can still buy a used DS for half less". Counterpoint: wear and tear. DSes are 20+ years old. If I look to buy one today, I'll probably have to choose between scratched touchscreen and cracked hinges.

Still no GB Studio projects for the foreseeable future, but for the GBA I finally found a better flashcart. The old one works well with my project, but only because I use standard 2D sprites and backgrounds without any visual effects. The moment things get fancy, it starts stuttering, then crashes.

In the French gaming culture, the Arabic word "cheh" is often used to express gloating over someone's misfortune or defeat. That's why I burst out laughing when I saw this. I'm keeping this screenshot of the feisty Chespin from Legends Z-A, who knows, I might need it as a reaction image someday.

As I've said before, I'm reworking the Sonic 1 engine for #Sonic8BitAdvance before continuing the Sonic 2 part. The movements have been adjusted and GHZ Act 1 plays quite nice. But I'll have to do all of it two more times. Once for the underwater parts and once just for THIS ONE-OFF THING:

Pokémon Legends Z-A done. Say what you want about this game (and, granted, there are things to say and flaws to point out), but I couldn't put it down from the moment I got it until now, when I literally ran out of things to do. Not a GOTY by a long shot, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Just walked my sexagenarian father through installing VLC on Linux (Kubuntu) on the phone. Just a couple of clicks and a password to enter, no terminals necessary. Take that, "Linux is too hard to use" crowd.

Just FYI: taking a break from developing #Sonic8BitAdvance, I'm playing Pokémon Legends Z-A and can't put it down. I'm in the postgame with a completed Pokédex already, so it shouldn't be long. Although I am dead set on finishing all the sidequests and finding all the collectibles.

Apparently there was a mistake on this front. The game loads the map by chunks, as it should. A single Lumiose city model does exist, but is only used in a cutscene.

To quote Terry from Brooklyn Nine-Nine: WHYYYYYYYYY?!!! 80.lv/articles/pok...

I knew I would eventually go back to the Sonic 1 part of #Sonic8BitAdvance and revise the engine to make it more faithful now that I got the technique of analyzing the RAM directly. I'm not procrastinating before implementing the contents of Sonic 2, but I'm doing it now. It would bug me otherwise.

Unlike Sonic 1 8-Bit, 2 8-Bit uses foreground tiles rather sparcely. Secret paths in particular aren't obscured by foreground tiles in 2 8-Bit, as seen in zones 1 and 3. So my secret paths with new Coin boxes follow the same logic, no matter how bad it makes them look in 2🙃. Compare and contrast.

After taking tons of screenshots in Meka to analyze Sonic's speed on slopes in the Master System original, I fire up #Sonic8BitAdvance with the player object replaced with a special "test player" object... only to take tons of screenshots again and compare the numbers. It's tedious, but it works.

Oh God, I'll have to examine all slopes in the game if I want it to work normally, won't I? At least with the first game, it was simple, the difference between the two types of slopes was: either Sonic slipped on it or he didn't. Here I'll have to examine his speed on each and every slope...

BTW, me showing the list of ROMs in my latest screenshots of Meka wasn't me admitting to pirating, I'm not a fan of piracy. I own all of these games as cartridges (obviously except for the homebrew MS one). Last year I bought a RetroN5 and hacked it so I could dump ROMs and voilà, legal collection.

It turns out, despite strange audio glitches that made me think there was something wrong with the Master System ROM, the values in the RAM are the same as in the Game Gear ROM, meaning I can use the MS version as a base for figuring out how the engine works. Good. Using the GG version was torture.

After having analyzed simple screenshots of Sonic 2 8-Bit to figure out how slopes worked for #Sonic8BitAdvance and being stumped, I ended up finding Sonic's speed values in the RAM and taking a series of screenshots of the entire emulator as I made Sonic stop on the game's very first slope.

When something is ALMOST perfect to you, but not quite, the "not quite" part really sticks out. I love using @kde.org Plasma, it's been my DE of choice of over a decade. But... Who thought the option to display subcategories in the Kickoff launcher was so useless it could be ditched altogether?

I know AAA games on Linux still need Valve, CodeWeavers and the community to do their magic and some software remains off-limits, but smaller stuff? Average GameMaker games? Emulators or tools without Linux ports? Nowadays most tend to just work with Wine. Download, double-click, done. I love it.

Still alive, still struggling to make the Sonic 2 8-bit engine work for the second half of #Sonic8BitAdvance. Man, I just can't figure out how those slopes work. My usual tactic of taking and analyzing series of screenshots is clearly not enough.

For the longest time, I thought my Retroid Pocket 2S was all I needed in terms of homebrew/emulation consoles. Then this showed up. Specs are not known yet, but if it runs on Android, I'll take several: retrododo.com/anbernics-up...

Sonic 2 8-bit's way of handling slopes is way different from Sonic 1 8-bit. The biggest apparent difference is Sonic slides down most (not all) slopes when standing still in 1, but not in 2. And then there's this. These slopes are identical, but on one, Sonic keeps his speed, on another he doesn't.

I wish automatic AI translations on YouTube had a "don't translate these languages" option like Google Chrome does. I speak four languages and whenever a video in one gets automatically retitled or redubbed into another, it irritates me to no end.

Still tweaking the #Sonic8BitAdvance engine for the part with Sonic 2 8-bit. Somehow I used to think the engines of 1 and 2 (8-bit versions) were so similar, it was possible to make a Sonic 3K-like fusion of both games. I don't think so anymore.

I dug into that recent Pokémon patent on @theverge.com in the interest of getting some facts straight www.theverge.com/games/779062...

I googled how to get Continues in Sonic 2 8-bit (I know about the Tails panel and the Crystal Egg box, but I had a doubt about Chaos Emeralds). The AI chimed in, and... what? For those who don't know: there are no Special Stages in Sonic 2 8-bit. The first Important Note is completely wrong too.

I know these boxes aren't in Sonic 2. And I don't intend to put them in for the time being. But if I ever decide to add a "slightly easier" mode or something, I already have them in the code, fully functional. #Sonic8BitAdvance

I guess this suggestion on YouTube isn't going away anytime soon.

What in the world...? OK, I'm taking a break. #Sonic8BitAdvance

The "Sonic 1" half of #Sonic8BitAdvance is done for the time being (I'll polish the engine and fix the remaining bugs later), I'm moving on to Sonic 2. The first thing I did was the zone titles. The trees and clouds visible through the letters were...interesting to implement. I had to get creative.

I find it genuinely impressive how the compiler and all the tools that come with it (like those that deal with graphics and sound and stuff) optimize a Game Boy Advance C++ project. Project size: almost 150 Mb. Compiled ROM size: just slightly over 6Mb.

Another "you had one job" moment in the original Sonic 1 8-Bit: strangely inconsistent spacing between Sonic's portrait, the lives counter and the "x" between the two. Not present in the Game Gear version where there are no spaces at all between the three.

Something I just noticed in the original Sonic 1 8-Bit: Takefuni Yunoue and Masato Nakamura's names are misspelled in the credits. Those aren't K's in their names, those are X's. Check the K in Ayano Koshiro's name, it's visibly different. This mistake is present in both MS and GG versions.

Literally working on the last screen of the game. #Sonic8BitAdvance

Well, all things considered, I think I managed the screen crunch in the final boss arena just fine. I started working on the ending, where the capsule breaks and Eggman escapes. Feels surreal. But the #Sonic8BitAdvance is far from done. I have yet the Sonic 2 part to add and the engine to improve.

I think this is the first time I'm having a problem with screen crunch in #Sonic8BitAdvance. And of course, it has to be on the final boss. I have three important things on screen: the two electric thingies that slide back and forth and the yellow lamp/gun that fires balls of electricity.

Not to toot my own horn (I mean, this is mostly the Game Boy Advance being more powerful than the Master System and the Butano engine being awesome) but it feels so weird to play Sky Base Zone Act 2 at full speed, without any slowdown.

Tinkering with Sky Base Zone act 1 for #Sonic8BitAdvance and its gimmick with electric wires. The original game flashes the screen very rapidly when they activate and you know what problems that causes. Origins Plus slowed the flashing down, but I though it didn't look good. So here's my take: