Notices by Misty (misty@digipres.club)

The "RJ" in "RJ-45" stands for Ronnie James, who took time away from his music career for some industrial design

@foone This is making me wonder what the max is now... I'm impressed it resized it to a 12MB 3330x2491 pixel image. At that point why not keep the original?

New blog post! I've written a little bit about CD archiving, but wanted to get into a bit of a more practical example - what you might easily miss when backing up a CD, and data you could accidentally end up throwing away.

https://www.mistys-internet.website/blog/blog/2025/01/23/what-you-might-miss-when-backing-up-cds/

I'm sorry. I know that if a robot asks if there are stairs in my house, it's a bad idea

I've seen a lot of debates over whether old non-square-pixel games are "really" drawn for their intended aspect ratio and should be played in 4:3 or not, but here's a fun one: a game where the *same screen* contains content drawn for the correct aspect ratio and content where they forgot to take it into account.

This game runs in 640x240, so every pixel is twice as tall as it is wide. The left screenshot is how it displays on a TV, with Santa and the globe looking right but a distorted sleigh.

@foone I'm surprised at how some of these end up surviving. Marvel vs Capcom 3 had a "hold both directions" bug that let you block both left and right at the same time - IIRC you could do it on a gamepad using dpad+analogue stick, same as that Zelda bug. Which is pretty bad for a fighting game!!

@foone This is a gift, thank you

@foone this stork

@foone Yes please

@foone Oh right, forgot to mention about that transparent image with the weird transparency we were talking about! I managed to find a way to use it with the game’s debug mode… and the transparency really is just broken. Haha.

@foone Hahaha… oh dear. It really is a thing, huh

Hit the classic personal project roadblock: the tool itself is done, but I need to finish the blog post announcing it

It's surreal seeing posts about ballot boxes in "Vancouver" hit by arson while we're in the middle of an election recount here - turns out that's Vancouver, Washington, not here

@foone I appreciate you get the shoutout right in the bio!

Recommendation: check out the Cinematic Moments Of All Time blog. Pairs game screenshots with unrelated movie quotes; doesn't always work but when it does it's *great*.

https://cinematicmoments.bearblog.dev/theshaggydog1959moneypuzzleexchanger1997/

@foone That would be a big help, thank you! How can I send the files?

@foone That makes sense, thanks! I was figuring it was likely a mistake.

This is in some files from something that was never finished, so it tracks that it just hadn’t been polished up yet.

And I guess followup question: if this *was* used for 8-bit transparency, is there a good way to do an automated conversion to a real alpha channel?

Graphics question: I've got a set of transparent graphics in old BMPs which uses a colour as the alpha mask. Not all of the magenta pixels are exactly the same tone - seems like there's some gradient. Is that a technique that was ever used for 8-bit transparency back in the day? Or is this just a sign that the edge cutout wasn't done precisely?

Interesting-looking software engineer position open on the Internet Archive's Archive-It team. https://app.trinethire.com/companies/32967-internet-archive/jobs/99996-software-engineer-archiving-data-services-remote