Notices by allison (aparrish@friend.camp)

@mntmn the pacing in ME2 is wayyyy better than in ME1 imo

@mntmn i mean... mass effect? ME1 combat mechanics are not great, especially at the beginning of the game, but i love combat in ME2 and 3

my bootleg gameboy cart lives!! sorta! i can flash a game on it and play it but only on the occasions when the rp2040 actually starts up... which seems to happen only randomly, like one out of twenty tries. but that is a problem for tomorrow allison; tonight allison is overjoyed that it works at all!

if anyone has ideas about the inconsistent power, i'd love advice! the schematic for the voltage regulator section is attached. the lm66200 is there so i'm never accidentally powering from both gameboy and USB; the regulator is a regular old 3.3v linear regulator. 3.3v goes to the rp2040, which has the normal decoupling cap setup. after power up, voltages on inputs/output are normal, but the rp2040 doesn't initialize. i suspect startup current draw is an issue?

okay it turns out the problem wasn't with power at all—I just needed to get the rp2040 to wait a bit longer for the crystal to start oscillating (see e.g. https://forums.raspberrypi.com/search.php?keywords=PICO_XOSC_STARTUP_DELAY_MULTIPLIER) with that fix, it starts up without fail every time, and my SRAM even holds a save! only remaining functional issue is that I can only flash 1MB of my 2MB chip. I suspect this is a software problem on my part (though I only ever used a 512KB chip on my breadboard proto, so even 1MB working is a win)

i just started playing pokémon yellow on my own game boy flash cart that i designed and assembled, which feels pretty good! i still have a ton more stuff to test and work on though (e.g., is the power draw for this whole setup reasonable; is the cart actually resistant to SRAM scrambling at power-down; are there MBC1/MBC5 compatibility issues I need to address etc)

(the distinguishing feature of this flash cart design btw is that it doesn't use any parts recycled from original carts, and it uses the rp2040 instead of a CPLD to mimic the memory bank controller)

getting close to v0.2 of this cart! changes include: open drain-compatible level shifter (should hopefully help w/a bunch of subtle bus contention problems); smaller footprint qspi flash; shorter battery clip and inset usb port (so it'll fit inside an unmodified cart shell, hopefully); and i added one more address line to both the parallel flash and sram (8MB flash is cheaper than 4MB, and 256KB sram is about the same price as 128KB... would be fairly easy to make this a multicart?!)

@mntmn would it be possible to speculate about when we'd be able to get a pocket reform with this module? i love the pocket form factor but with this module it suddenly goes from "fun curiosity" to "potential daily driver"

i made this custom game boy flash cart by "dead bug" soldering a DIP parallel flash chip to a cartridge edge breakout board that i designed. there's no memory bank controller in here, so you can only flash roms up to 32kb (i have tetris on there now haha) but i like how it turned out!

this table of C escape characters is making the same noises as I do when I have to wake up early

got the very very beginnings of a first-person dungeon crawler for the gameboy working (it's not reading from a map here yet, it's just drawing random walls whenever i press A)

if I were making an art project and not a game, i'd probably just stop here, set up a gameboy in a gallery with this thing running, and say it's a commentary on uh modernity

progress: now it's reading from a map (big array with 1s for wall, 0s for no-wall) and movement works, including sidestep. now i gotta like... make it so there's something to do in there

this paper is so so good https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09800 it outlines the properties of conversational AI systems that cause people to anthropomorphize them, and the reasons that makers of such systems lean into those properties (i.e. "engagement" = $$$), and why that's almost always a bad idea. the authors categorize it as a position paper but it's useful as a literature review too imo

especially love this quote where the authors are just like... "have you stopped for a second to consider why you're even doing this?!"

@samplereality i've been getting messages like this too :/ almost feel like we should turn them into commissions. "sure, I have that article. paypal me $1000 and give me a couple of weeks"

sometimes when I tell my students that "reading is not passive, it is an active process," it seems like they think I'm making some kind of poetic metaphor, or deploying fusty deconstructionist theory. and maybe I *am* doing that, but I am also plainly stating that when you are reading, you are making your eyes move across the page in weird ways, and you have learned strategies for doing that

as a quick reminder, or for new followers: for a while now, I have been writing critically about large language models from the perspective of a poet, linguist, computer programmer and trans person (which I think is an at least somewhat unique perspective?). here are some links to things I've written, if you're interested...