Michael Pavone

Someone posted a vibe-coded Genesis/Sega CD/32X emulator to the emudev Discord today. It's not particularly fast (a debug build of BlastEm is faster), it's not particularly accurate, it's not portable and the code looks about as you expect, but it does run games. Not sure how I feel about it.

On the one hand, at least in its current state, it kind of sucks so I don't think it will get much use. I'm not really surprised that this is possible. Kind of expected better results given that the README claims a number of other emulators (including BlastEm) were used as a reference.

I bought one of these when my 2017 Bolt got totaled. I don't love that it's a little bigger, but it's a solid car with some nice improvements over the original Bolt. It also has physical buttons and knobs for all the common controls unlike some pricier EVs on the market

My read of AB 2074 is that it sounds like a big deal because it allows some rather tall heights, but the specifics mean the cities impacted don't actually have to change their existing zoning much. Is this correct?

It only applies to cities with over 400K population with at least one SB79 stop and it allows the cities in question a lot of latitude to where regional transit hub districts are placed. Just need to be contiguous, >= 0.25 sq miles and contain at least one SB79 stop.

California's law prematurely forcing transit agencies to adopt zero-emission busses was ill-advised for a lot of reasons, but given recent diesel prices it's kind of unfortunate the BEB rollout isn't further along. Even with 2024 prices, AC Transit was seeing better cost per mile with Gillig BEBs

Reliability has been an issue with some BEBs, but at least as of the last progress report AC Transit was seeing better mean-time between failures and comparable availability for their Gillig BEBs as Hybrid Diesel, though their non-hybrid diesels were considerably more reliable than either.

Made some good progress on adding CHD support to BlastEm over the holiday weekend. Not integrated into the emulator yet, but I was able to decompress some CHDs (though only ones that use zlib and/or FLAC). Should be able to get it finished up in time for the 1.0 release on Friday

Feels like every time I see a neat retro Sega project these days, once I look under the hood it's obvious it's AI generated. Latest example is a port of emuTOS to Mega CD. Not disclosed, but a quick look at PLAN.md in the repo makes it fairly obvious

I spent over 6 years of my life working on a game very loosely based on Waterworld. Over 7 years later, I'm finally watching the movie for the first time.

Shadow of the Colossus. It's a game with interesting ideas and was technically ambitious, but I did not enjoy it at all. Boss fights are usually the part of a game I like the least and it's basically just boss fights with long uneventful horse rides in between.

In exactly 1 month, I'm going to release BlastEm 1.0! This will be the first "stable" release since 2019 and will mark exactly 13 years since the release of BlastEm 0.1.0. Compared to 0.6.2, this release adds support for Sega CD, 32X, Sega Pico, Yamaha Copera, Game Gear, SC-3000 and Colecovision

I don't really get the thesis behind the "SaaS-pocalypse". Like I get that certain types of software development might be uniquely under threat due to the ability to have an LLM quickly churn out code that does roughly what you want, but why SaaS specifically?

I think if I had to name a villain for the woes of the game industry (beyond the obvious RAM shortage one), I would probably pick performance marketing. This is what drives the economics of the typical F2P game that represent an increasingly large share of industry revenue

As long as the ARPU (average revenue per user) of these new users is less than CPI, you can keep pumping more money into advertising. Now strictly speaking, this is true of any game and not just F2P ones, but the conversion ratios make it much more favorable to F2P games

I think if I had to name a villain for the woes of the game industry (beyond the obvious RAM shortage one), I would probably pick performance marketing. This is what drives the economics of the typical F2P game that represent an increasingly large share of industry revenue

One of the downsides to hosting your own Bluesky PDS, is that when the server it's hosted on is unreachable you can't post to let people know that your server is down. Anyway, my hosting provider suffered a DDOS over the weekend that took down the BlastEm website and my bsky PDS.