347: Is That The Monster from Godzilla?

00:00SPEAKERYou ever do the thing where you find a thing that you're looking for and you're like, oh man, that's great

00:05SPEAKERI found the thing I'm looking for and then like you're like I don't need it right now

00:09SPEAKERI'm gonna put it someplace safe and

00:11SPEAKERThen you're never gonna believe what happened next go on when I got to the point that I was like I need the thing

00:17SPEAKERI couldn't remember where the safe place was

00:19SPEAKERSo I needed an Ethernet dongle for a USB C Ethernet dongle for a project

00:26SPEAKERI'm working on okay, and I was like I absolutely have one of these because I used to have a laptop that didn't have an Ethernet

00:32SPEAKERBoard I needed wired Ethernet

00:33SPEAKERSo I had a USB C Ethernet dongle that at the time

00:36SPEAKERwhen I bought it in 2017 was probably like $60 because they used to be really expensive and

00:42SPEAKERI was like, I'm gonna find I cleaned out my desk. I found it. I was like, this is great. Fantastic

00:47SPEAKERPut it someplace safe. I went to get it yesterday

00:50SPEAKERAnd anyway, the TLDR is I ordered one from Amazon and got here this morning. So it's 15 bucks

00:54SPEAKEROh, no the place where is the secret place the safe Amazon? It turns out the secret place is Amazon

01:01SPEAKERSo thanks on car for my USB C

01:06SPEAKEREthernet dongle

01:08SPEAKERWay cheaper than the last one and the cables nicer, so I guess that's good

01:11SPEAKERI'm gonna put that on top of my desk where I have to look at it until I use it

01:15SPEAKERSo it's not in a safe place

01:17SPEAKERFrom this point on everything goes in the one. This is why we have the junk drawer the one drawer

01:21SPEAKERIt's a nightmare, but it's where you know, you can you can always find something junk drawers always got you

01:27SPEAKERI'm gonna go and tell you we I've lived in this house for almost 20 years now

01:30SPEAKERMy entire house is the junk drawer quest. They're all the whole thing

01:34SPEAKERI I did such a good job when I was doing VR stuff

01:37SPEAKERI needed to have like 10 by 10 square foot space to do VR stuff in my office

01:41SPEAKERSo my office was always really clean the floor was always clear

01:45SPEAKERI had well-defined areas on the walls where the shelves were and nothing else in the room and

01:49SPEAKERThen I stopped doing VR stuff and immediately now I have two CRTs. I got a printer

01:54SPEAKERI got a 3d printer got an air conditioner. I've got a million spools of filament. I got an old monitor

02:00SPEAKERIt's a disaster over there. I was just talking to a friend of the pod Steve Lynn a couple days ago about some new

02:07SPEAKERmini DV tapes that I discovered at my father's house that I now need to digitize and

02:13SPEAKERSteve was like, oh, well, you know, the good thing is most of those players would use firewire

02:18SPEAKERThey'd have firewire built in and I had a black and white

02:22SPEAKERflashback moment to me looking at a firewire cable in my

02:26SPEAKERMy box of cables that I'd kept for 15 years and going just let it go. You're never gonna use this fire

02:36SPEAKERSo so here's the funny thing I

02:39SPEAKERI have two firewire cables one 400 and 1 800 that are in the keeper drawer

02:45SPEAKERSo there's like there's there's the cables that I don't think about and when I need one, I can't find it

02:50SPEAKERI just hit the Amazon button and I feel bad about it, but I do it anyway, cuz like

02:55SPEAKERShipping is free and it'll be here tomorrow

02:57SPEAKERBut the firewire 800 and 400 both really hard to get I also I've added to the keeper drawer

03:04SPEAKEROn RCA cables since I got the CRTs back in my life RCA

03:09SPEAKERS video I don't have a skart because I'm not any kind of I'm not that kind of weird pervert

03:14SPEAKERbut I do have some component cables in there and

03:18SPEAKERThat's that's pretty much that's that's the end of my line

03:21SPEAKERso well

03:23SPEAKERIt turned out

03:24SPEAKERThat I was lucky to have not immediately jumped on Amazon and buy the firewire cable because I came home check the tape again

03:29SPEAKERAnd you know what? It's VHSC. Oh

03:32SPEAKERYou win I win

03:33SPEAKERI got good news and bad news because the adapter for VHSC to a normal VHS player is about 60 bucks now

03:40SPEAKERI win and I lose

03:44SPEAKER[Music]

04:11SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. And I'm not Brad. I'm Wes

04:17SPEAKERSoutherner filling in

04:19SPEAKERYeah, welcome. Welcome West Fenland a little further south a little

04:23SPEAKERBut a fairly large number of guest appearances on the show now. Welcome back to the show. It's a privilege privilege next time

04:29SPEAKERI will remember if I'm filling in for Brad to like mess with the bass on my mic

04:34SPEAKERSo I come in twice as deep as I normally do then I can be a good fake

04:38SPEAKERI can bring you down. I can I can EQ you all the way down just take out all the highs and and

04:44SPEAKERBring you into the extreme low, but Wes if you don't know is a we were you're a senior editor

04:48SPEAKERYeah, senior editor at PC gamer. I've been there for 12 years. Oh my god. Holy crap. Yeah

04:54SPEAKERWhich means it's been more than 12 years since I worked for you Will. We're aging more rapidly than ever

05:01SPEAKERThe funny thing about that is when you when you were like, hey, I think I'm gonna take this job at PC gamer

05:05SPEAKERI was like, oh you shouldn't do that games media isn't gonna last

05:08SPEAKERBut you're you guys are holding out you're holding strong out there. So congratulations. We're trying it sort of feels like

05:15SPEAKERI was saying to you before we record the podcast sort of feels a little bit like being in a rowboat at the edge of

05:19SPEAKERThe world and turns out the world is not a sphere

05:22SPEAKERIt is in fact two-dimensional and you can fall off the edge of it into the abyss never to be seen again

05:27SPEAKERBut we're pedaling as hard as we can

05:30SPEAKERYeah, so there's a three or four metaphors in there, but I get what you're talking about

05:35SPEAKERYou're also the proprietor of the ROM read-only memo

05:41SPEAKERBi-weekly newsletter about emulation and emulation happenings. Is that yeah, you nailed it every every two weeks when I can sometimes

05:48SPEAKERI miss a week. I have to delay a little bit when there's something like a summer game fest going on

05:53SPEAKERBut yeah, it's pretty much every two week. And I mean it's it is

05:58SPEAKEROstensibly about emulation. Sometimes the stuff I'm writing about is a little bit more

06:02SPEAKERYou know just loosely related to emulation. I love writing about fan translations of you know, Japanese games usually

06:09SPEAKERAnd those most people play in emulators and most people develop them using emulators

06:15SPEAKERBut you could still you know

06:17SPEAKERPut it on a flash cart and play one of these on a Super Nintendo if you want to do most of the time

06:22SPEAKERI think that's safe to say that stuff is emulation adjacent enough that you're not out over your skis

06:27SPEAKERYeah, I think the audience overlap is about 98 percent there. So I

06:32SPEAKERCircle with a little sliver off to the side

06:36SPEAKERBut yeah, yeah, so a bunch of interesting stuff has happened in emulation. I'm bummed that Brad's not here. He's still out on

06:42SPEAKERsome personal stuff

06:44SPEAKERAnd he he's definitely like he's appreciates the thoughts people have been sending really nice messages. So

06:52SPEAKERBut

06:54SPEAKERSo I'm bummed he's not here to talk about this

06:55SPEAKERBut I'm excited that you're here to talk about it because I I have a lot of questions. There's been

07:00SPEAKERLike it seems like the well, okay, so to top it

07:03SPEAKERWe're gonna do two topics today just to the front so people know

07:05SPEAKERThe first one is we're gonna talk about

07:07SPEAKERRecompiles and what's going on with that whole scene and D and the different recompiles and decompiles?

07:11SPEAKERKind of get into that and then there's also been a lot of cool stuff happening in the mister scene

07:16SPEAKERWhich we haven't talked about in a minute and we're gonna get to that at the end

07:20SPEAKERLike some wild stuff is happening over there

07:22SPEAKERso let's let's start with the recompiles though because this seems like the kind of hotness especially for

07:28SPEAKERIt's like early 3d games. Mostly is where it seems like the real exciting stuff is happening like

07:34SPEAKER64 PlayStation stuff like that. Yeah, I would say it's I mean there are projects that you know

07:39SPEAKERGo as far back as like NES and Gameboy

07:42SPEAKERThere are people tackling that stuff

07:43SPEAKERBut I'm I agree with you that like the exciting stuff and where there is the most action right now is in

07:50SPEAKERThat early to I guess you would call like the Xbox 360 mid 3d era

07:56SPEAKERI don't know. But you know, we're kind of talking like 95 to

08:00SPEAKER2010 is kind of where like a lot of these projects are are really like taking taking off right now West

08:06SPEAKERIt's 2026 we can call that turn of the century now Jesus. Yeah, I guess we can

08:11SPEAKERbut yeah, so the kind of the really like active projects for

08:16SPEAKERgame recompilations which are ports of

08:19SPEAKEROlder games to or they don't even necessarily have to be older but ports of games to a platform

08:25SPEAKERThey were not originally designed for it's really focused around the n64 and the Xbox

08:31SPEAKER360 and then there's also some stuff kind of starting to take off around the ps1 and there are projects

08:38SPEAKERStarting to dig into like the the game cube and we as well, but I don't know when you're gonna actually be playing

08:44SPEAKERPlaying any of those that's still really early. It seemed like to me that the first thing that really took off was a

08:51SPEAKERRecomp of Mario 64, right? Yes, and no that was a

08:57SPEAKERThis is where it gets really confusing because that was a originally

09:00SPEAKERThat was a decompilation of the game that got a port that was not using this

09:06SPEAKERframework

09:07SPEAKERcalled n64 recompiled that a lot of the ports are now based off of but it was like

09:14SPEAKEREffectively for the end-user. It was the same thing

09:16SPEAKERYou're playing a version of a game where they've you know

09:20SPEAKERReverse engineered what the code for the original game was doing rewritten it to run on

09:26SPEAKERyou know windows or Linux or whatever on a on a x86 processor and then kind of

09:32SPEAKERbuilt basically a version of the game that you just plug your

09:35SPEAKERROM code into so they can distribute it without the assets of the original game

09:40SPEAKERSo the Nintendo doesn't nuke them from orbit and then because they've programed it for this other platform

09:46SPEAKERYou can get all the kind of niceties of that platform, right? Like you can run the game at

09:51SPEAKER600 FPS you can do texture mods you can do ultrawide all of that kind you can do

09:57SPEAKERYou know like instant Xbox controller mapping all of that like nice stuff that you would kind of expect from a PC game

10:03SPEAKERBut you would not expect from an n64 game running in an emulator, for example, and and okay

10:09SPEAKERSo the process you you hit it a second ago, but I'm just gonna say it again

10:13SPEAKERSo these people rewrite the code for the game. So they're basically rewriting the game

10:17SPEAKERexecutable. Yeah, and then

10:19SPEAKERYou're providing a ROM which of course you've ripped yourself using like a retron or something like that

10:24SPEAKERYeah, pull it pulled it off of your own cart that you own. Yep. Everyone does that. Yes, and you're not using

10:30SPEAKERso this avoids like the problems that people that companies have with by with emulators where you don't have to have like a

10:36SPEAKERPirated BIOS that's a copyrighted file that comes off of the console. You're not you're not running

10:43SPEAKERYou know

10:44SPEAKERillegal software in any way shape or form here exactly and and a lot of the I mean

10:49SPEAKERThe amazing thing about emulation is you are targeting a system and you're you're trying to recreate, you know

10:56SPEAKEREvery minute function of that hardware and how games used it and that's really cool and I still love that

11:02SPEAKERbut this is a much more like specific way of

11:06SPEAKERre-implementing those games without a lot of the guess you would say the baggage that comes with that from a

11:11SPEAKERGame-playing perspective right? Like if you're trying to

11:15SPEAKERYou know do unlocked frame rates in a game

11:19SPEAKERYou can't there are ways to maybe do that with an emulator

11:23SPEAKERBut you're you're trying to like replicate the original hardware and then like overclock that emulated CPU

11:29SPEAKERfor example, right which is very different than

11:32SPEAKERuntethering your code from how that original hardware worked and

11:37SPEAKERReprogramming it for this new platform. So like a lot of these

11:40SPEAKERN64, you know ports can run at hundreds and hundreds of FPS because they're not worried about like

11:48SPEAKERaccurately representing the

11:50SPEAKERN64 CPU which you know was not very powerful compared to a

11:54SPEAKER16 core CPU today. Well, it was a 2 megabyte of RAM system or something like that at the time

12:00SPEAKERUm, I think you go up to 4 with the with the memory expansion card, right?

12:04SPEAKERMaybe it was I think it was 8 with the expansion card. Maybe but yeah, not much not much room

12:10SPEAKERSo we had Mike Mike from digital eclipse on years and years ago. Mmm talking about

12:17SPEAKERLike archival games we should we should actually revisit that topic. It's been a long time since we talked to him, but he talked about

12:23SPEAKERhow they

12:25SPEAKERremastered like Mega Man for that Mega Man collection so that it felt exactly the same and the movement was the same and like the

12:33SPEAKERframes were the same essentially when you're playing whether you're playing on the the version for the modern consoles or the the older version and

12:40SPEAKERrather than using an emulated version and

12:43SPEAKERLike is this the same process for that but just done freelance or yeah

12:47SPEAKERThe interesting thing is like a lot of the like legacy collections of older games are not

12:53SPEAKERThis process a lot of them are running an emulator of some kind but that Mega Man legacy collection that digital eclipse did actually is

13:01SPEAKERstatic recompilation, so it is kind of the predecessor of

13:06SPEAKERThe a lot of these fan projects that are now popping up they kind of did it

13:11SPEAKERBespoke for that set of was it the first four or five Mega Man games something like that for the NES

13:16SPEAKERIt was it was like this Ness and Ness ones. I think right but but not Mega Man X

13:21SPEAKERYeah, yeah, I didn't have X games

13:23SPEAKERBut so they they kind of I don't know that that was the first use of this Nexus necessarily

13:28SPEAKERbut they did it, you know ten years ago or so and

13:31SPEAKERPeople kind of finally in the hobby community caught on to being able to do this themselves

13:36SPEAKERI think it really started to come to a head when

13:40SPEAKERMore of these games were getting decompiled and people were kind of looking in that and going okay like here's sort of another way

13:47SPEAKERWe can get at this without having to go through this

13:51SPEAKERIncredibly lengthy process of like matching up every single function of the game code

13:57SPEAKERWhich is what you do in a decompilation which can take years unless you have a lot of people working on are they starting with?

14:03SPEAKERThe decompiled code or is there something more complicated happening now?

14:05SPEAKERSo the the main projects right now that are that are interesting and have a lot of activity around them are

14:12SPEAKERN64 recompiled and Rex glue

14:15SPEAKERWhich is for the Xbox 360 and Rex glue is kind of built on top of some other

14:21SPEAKERRecompilation projects for the 360 and it's sort of like bundling stuff up and making it a bit easier to use

14:27SPEAKERbut the the gist of it is they're building a

14:30SPEAKERframework that

14:32SPEAKERIt is not nearly this simple

14:34SPEAKERBut the idea is that you could take a take an N64 game plop it into this N64 recompiled

14:42SPEAKERSDK I don't I think they're calling an SDK and

14:45SPEAKERBasically have it

14:47SPEAKERjust

14:49SPEAKERrecognize what the code of that N64 game is doing and properly match it to

14:54SPEAKERC code that could run on your PC so in the like dream scenario version

15:00SPEAKERYou're just plugging that a game in and it's just like yep

15:03SPEAKERThis is how it should run on the PC and just does it all for you. It's it's not that right now

15:09SPEAKERIt's more a much more manual process

15:11SPEAKERBut that's kind of like that's that's what they're going for with this thing

15:15SPEAKERAnd then it comes along with they've done a lot of work to create like a graphics renderer that works

15:20SPEAKERwell on PC and like a

15:22SPEAKERkind of port

15:25SPEAKERUI and stuff so that you've kind of got your like launcher and your controller settings and stuff built in

15:31SPEAKERBecause okay

15:32SPEAKERSo there's an interesting thing that happened in the transition from 2d games to 3d games

15:36SPEAKERAnd it's the the thing that changed is that the 3d renderer is kind of generic especially for the first couple of 3d generations, right?

15:44SPEAKERit's just rendering triangles on screen and how it processes those triangles and how it processes those textures and

15:50SPEAKERMore my understanding is that at least on the early hardware up through the 360 and ps3

15:56SPEAKERgeneration

15:58SPEAKERPs3 is a little special. I know

16:00SPEAKERThe kind of like it's just texture filtering and triangles and it's pretty straightforward

16:06SPEAKERthe the pipelines through there so

16:08SPEAKERYou can have kind of a generic sized renderer for the 360 or the n64 the gamecube

16:14SPEAKERThat that just kind of works on all the games and then you just have to run the game code

16:18SPEAKERThrough the through the other part of the problem. Is that an oversimplification or I

16:23SPEAKERmean some some of that is honestly beyond my my head every time I try to get into the

16:29SPEAKERLike the real technical explain II side of this I I feel how much I am NOT a programmer

16:36SPEAKERSo I try not to say anything to boneheaded

16:40SPEAKERbut like the the simplistic version of it is

16:44SPEAKERyou are able to

16:46SPEAKERput a version of a game into n64 recompiled and it kind of

16:51SPEAKERStarts you on your way towards having a version of it that is recompiled into C code and then from there

16:58SPEAKERyou just have to do a lot of the work to match up and it's like the game specific stuff because

17:05SPEAKEREvery console game is doing something funky here or there with how it was programmed to make best use of the hardware

17:12SPEAKEREspecially in this era where they had very limited

17:14SPEAKERhardware, right so, you know a game like rogue quadrant or something which has not been recompiled yet is probably a

17:20SPEAKERFreaking nightmare because they were getting so much juice out of the n64

17:25SPEAKERWell, I was gonna say yeah

17:27SPEAKERThis is the era when the difference between the start of generation games and the end of generation games

17:33SPEAKERThey were to look wildly different from each other and it's because people

17:36SPEAKERfigured out more and more ways to get a little bit more a little bit more here and a little bit more there and then

17:41SPEAKERAll of a sudden unlocked whole new whole new layers of capability and so I can read you like this is a very

17:47SPEAKERThis is just the kind of the beginning. Excuse me of the how it works section on

17:52SPEAKERthe n64 recomp github

17:54SPEAKERbut it just says the recompiler works by accepting a list of symbols and metadata alongside the binary with the goal of

18:01SPEAKERSplitting the input binary into functions that are each individually recompiled into a C function named according to the metadata

18:08SPEAKERSo, okay, that's that's the basics of it. But then, you know, there's a reason these projects can take

18:15SPEAKERmany months or

18:17SPEAKEREven potentially years to actually come together because it's it's not as simple as a drag-and-drop, right?

18:23SPEAKERBut um, well, that's that's the starting point and as it finds more and more unique code pass through it's gonna need more like

18:31SPEAKERMy guess is it's this is like the proton situation with that valves taken on where they started by fixing the most common

18:37SPEAKEREmulation problems and and now as they get further and further and they find more and more edge cases

18:43SPEAKERUntil at some point when the last game goes into the n64 recompiler

18:47SPEAKERIt'll just work out of the box because they'll found all of those edges before I don't know. This is maybe an oversimplification. I do

18:54SPEAKERAssume that as the project continues to mature and more people do recompilations with it that it will get you know

19:00SPEAKERIt will become faster and easier and and whatnot. I hope that's the case but we are starting to see

19:07SPEAKERI think like a pretty substantial

19:10SPEAKERacceleration and how many

19:12SPEAKERAre coming out though?

19:14SPEAKERWhether you're gonna want to play all of them or not

19:17SPEAKERRemains to be seen that's a little tease for what we'll talk about later

19:20SPEAKERI mean look the n64 generation is notoriously uneven. There's some real bangers on there

19:25SPEAKERAnd then there's a lot of also like not so much

19:28SPEAKERHey, there are as many as a dozen great games on the 10 to 64

19:35SPEAKERYeah, that seems about right. Um, look I loved 1080p 1080 snowboarding back in the day

19:40SPEAKERBut I don't think I'm gonna play any 1080 snowboarding in 2026

19:44SPEAKERone of the things I do think is really exciting about n64 recomp in particular though is

19:50SPEAKERthere's so many n64 games that just I

19:53SPEAKERThink looking back were hobbled by the capabilities of that system, you know, and so one of the recomb sits in progress right now is

20:02SPEAKERCastlevania 64 a game I never played a lot of but that actually seemed really cool to me

20:08SPEAKERbut it just like was too limited by what they could do with

20:13SPEAKERCamera control the frame rate capabilities of that game

20:16SPEAKERBut it was like weird and experimental in cool ways and that's a game that I would love to play on

20:22SPEAKERa not Nintendo 64 controller with like, you know a right stick to be able to pivot the camera and

20:28SPEAKERMaybe a draw distance increase beyond you know, ten feet in front of you

20:32SPEAKERI think there's a lot of stuff with these games that it's not going to be the pure

20:37SPEAKERrecreation of the pure experience, but it would

20:40SPEAKERLet some of these games shine in a way that they could not on that hardware

20:45SPEAKERSo yeah, I mean, I think that's a that's a good point what some of the stuff that is

20:49SPEAKERSo performance obviously is going to be better running on modern hardware in in a native environment

20:55SPEAKERBut doing things like adding right stick camera can support for a platform that didn't really have to stick controllers outside of that one

21:02SPEAKERweird golden eye mode

21:05SPEAKERIs is interesting

21:06SPEAKERIs there other stuff that people are adding on top of that or were they putting like 3d sound or anything weird in is it?

21:10SPEAKERYeah, there's there's quite a range of stuff the the renderer for the n64

21:16SPEAKERRecompiled stuff. It's called RT 64 and it supports or is going to support

21:23SPEAKERI'm not sure if it's actually this part of its finished yet, but they're like they're working on ray tracing or it

21:30SPEAKERThat's one thing some of the games

21:33SPEAKERare either launching with or getting post launch support with mods that are maybe not

21:40SPEAKEROutside the realm of what you could have done with a ROM hack for these games

21:43SPEAKERBut are much easier to do with a recompilation basically because of the way

21:50SPEAKERThe n64 recomp framework was designed. It was designed with modding in mind

21:54SPEAKERAnd so it makes the output C code that it's recompiled like just way easier to plug and play

22:02SPEAKERWith a mod whereas with ROM hacking like you're going into the memory and trying to squeeze stuff into places

22:09SPEAKERYou know in the in the ROM so the one of the recent

22:13SPEAKERcompilations was for harvest moon 64 this just came out about two weeks ago and the developer of that actually put out a

22:21SPEAKERMod that he designed with a like harvest moon

22:26SPEAKERI'm guessing a superfan the guy who had been decompiling it

22:29SPEAKERSo this guy spent like three years decompiling it and then collaborated with the recomp developer to put out a mod that does some

22:36SPEAKERThings like I think they let you like change the the timing of the game like the clock stuff

22:43SPEAKERI'll actually look it up what I had in it

22:45SPEAKERBut basically they looked at it and they were like there have been a lot of harvest moon games since 64

22:49SPEAKERThis one's kind of rough people who are gonna be playing it on this recomp

22:54SPEAKERWho are just kind of curious about this older game in the series are probably gonna bounce off of it because it's a little harsh

23:00SPEAKERnow, but what if we

23:02SPEAKERDid music persistence so instead of the music restarting every time you move from one map screen to another it just plays continuously

23:10SPEAKERBut sounds lovely they made it so that when it rains your crops get watered which feels like a thing that should have happened, right?

23:17SPEAKERThey added faster message speeds. So yeah, like this was a mod that came out like on release day

23:22SPEAKERSo they this was almost them saying like here's our you know, director's cut version of how we think this game could play

23:30SPEAKERYou know 25 years later with hindsight

23:32SPEAKERI actually kind of like that like it makes me think that like the the possibility of having

23:37SPEAKERsay an ocarina where you have an ocarina of time where you have right stick control or or

23:43SPEAKERAnimal crossing where you can stack fruit in the version that was out on the GameCube. Yeah, that sounds really nice. I think the

23:51SPEAKERPerfect example of this is in the Donkey Kong 64 recomp which isn't out yet

23:56SPEAKERBut just got announced about a week ago and in this recomp they're gonna have a mod

24:02SPEAKERThis is developed by a member of the recomp community and some guys who've spent years working on the DK 64 randomizer

24:09SPEAKERSo they know the game like inside and out and one of the mods they're gonna have at launch is the ability to swap

24:15SPEAKERI think they're calling it tag tag anywhere but to swap between Kong's at any spot in the level

24:22SPEAKERI don't remember if you don't know if you remember don't come 100% of DK 64. Okay, but it's been 30 years

24:28SPEAKERYeah, so you would have to pick up different colored bananas with each Kong in each level

24:33SPEAKERAnd when you were not the Kong that could pick up that color banana

24:37SPEAKERThey would be like transparent to just tease you and be like, oh, there's some blue bananas here

24:42SPEAKERBut you can't pick them up unless you switch over to

24:45SPEAKERChunky or lanky or whoever picked up the blue ones

24:48SPEAKERSo you'd have to go find a barrel to switch Kong's and they're adding a mod where you can just you know

24:53SPEAKERPress a button anywhere in the map and just switch between characters cut out 15 hours of backtracking from that

24:59SPEAKERYeah, those were bad hideous game

25:02SPEAKERI was gonna say the other mod I would make for that is just one to add like 15 more types of collectibles throughout

25:07SPEAKERThe game because if you're playing DK 64, that's clearly what you're there for. You're there for that punishment. Yeah. Yeah

25:13SPEAKERYou want those bad bananas?

25:17SPEAKERBanana, I mean look the other the other option you want in that game is the ability to just play DK rap for just on

25:24SPEAKERLoop the entire time it's going non-stop. So like the Star Trek engine noise

25:30SPEAKER24-hour loop videos except the DK rap. Yeah, exactly. That is like the cruelest thing

25:35SPEAKERI think you could inflict on another human being I support it. Look sometimes you sometimes you just want more DK rap in your life

25:43SPEAKERWhat what about you mentioned Rogue Squadron, which is like my all-time favorite. I mean realistically

25:48SPEAKERI like the GameCube versions the n64 one is a fine place to start but

25:51SPEAKERBut those those two GameCube games are all-time bangers on my list and they're kind of note - still notoriously hard to emulate

25:59SPEAKERI feel like dolphin has kind of got there eventually

26:02SPEAKERBut but they require some real horsepower. Are they is anything happening on that front as far as I know there is no

26:09SPEAKERcompilation in the works for Rogue Squadron, I think there is a

26:15SPEAKERDecomp on GitHub that has had some amount of progress to it, but I don't think it's active right now

26:23SPEAKERSo I don't think that's one that's gonna be coming anytime soon

26:28SPEAKERthat said from what I've

26:31SPEAKERWitnessed in the recomp server the people who really know their stuff like they know how to use this framework

26:37SPEAKERThey're good programmers

26:39SPEAKERThat they're dedicated to a particular game. They can spin one of these things up

26:45SPEAKERPretty quickly. So if there was somebody who just really really wanted to take on Rogue Squadron

26:51SPEAKERI wouldn't be surprised if they could do it in a few months and have it

26:56SPEAKERBut as far as I know no one has taken up that torch so far

27:00SPEAKERwell

27:01SPEAKERIt's it's the whole thing is really interesting because like you don't have to decompile it first in order for the recon

27:07SPEAKERTo be effective for each step to have somebody who's pretty good at symbol debugging

27:11SPEAKERAnd then the ability to rewrite the functions that need to be rewritten to do the thing that they want

27:16SPEAKERYou do not have to though. It does seem like it is such a

27:21SPEAKERadvantage to have that decompiled code where everything is mapped out so you can tell what all the functions do is

27:29SPEAKERreally helpful in speeding up the recomp process because

27:33SPEAKERthat feels to me like

27:35SPEAKERIt's basically having your like cheat sheet for the test

27:39SPEAKERNext to you. So instead of having to like solve all the problems when you hit them in the recompilation process

27:45SPEAKERYou can just be like, oh, what is this thing and just like look over the decompiled code and figure it out quite quickly

27:50SPEAKERSo not every single recomp that's come out had a completed decompilation

27:56SPEAKERBut quite a few of them did so I think that has been like a big

28:00SPEAKERBoon to the the process for those games and sped them up a lot

28:03SPEAKERbut you don't have you don't have to have it for sure and I think that is the goal of this process is that

28:08SPEAKEREventually, it will hopefully get to a spot where people aren't spending years

28:13SPEAKERDecompiling games unless they just want to do it for the challenge or for the research

28:18SPEAKERyou'll be able to do a recompilation a lot more quickly and and

28:23SPEAKERThen 64 seems perfect for this partly because the controls within 64 are notoriously bad

28:29SPEAKERPartly because the kind of flat 3d art style scales up really really well

28:33SPEAKERI think I think it is especially if you do a little bit of texture work

28:38SPEAKERFairly minimal texture work compared to a modern game. Yeah, like those games could look incredible, especially the n64 and GameCube era

28:45SPEAKERand then also I think because

28:49SPEAKERlike

28:50SPEAKERThe performance stuff that you mentioned before like that was a notoriously underperforming system in terms of frame rate back in the day and and

28:58SPEAKERThe you listed a whole bunch of recent and 64 recomp releases. We've talked about a couple of them

29:04SPEAKERBut like Bomberman 64, which I remember being super good and Duke Nukem Zero Hour

29:10SPEAKERWhich I never would have played because I had a PC. Yeah, and

29:14SPEAKER3d, is it a different game? I actually don't know I

29:18SPEAKERI'm kind of curious now. I want to fire up the mister and see but my

29:23SPEAKERLike I can't imagine Nintendo being like oh, yeah

29:26SPEAKERWe got to get Duke Nukem on our platform because like there were strippers and like you shot a bunch of cops and like

29:32SPEAKERI don't know man

29:34SPEAKERIt's snowboard kids too. Good. I don't remember that at all. That's on your list as well. Yeah, it's when I never played

29:40SPEAKERSo I don't know but I will probably check out the recompilation

29:44SPEAKERN64 cartridges were expensive back in the day it turns out so

29:48SPEAKERThere's also a lot of stuff happening in other in other you'd mentioned some Xbox 360 stuff. We talked about some PlayStation

29:54SPEAKERYeah, what you want to kind of dip into that? Yeah, I'm really excited for Rex glue the Xbox 360

30:01SPEAKERrecompilation framework because I mean

30:05SPEAKERDid those games run better than N64 games in general? Yes for sure

30:10SPEAKERBut I think it is similarly a system that has a lot to gain from recompilation

30:16SPEAKEROne there's still a decent number of games from that generation. They just never got you know, HD ports, right?

30:24SPEAKERThere's some stuff that's just kind of marooned on the Xbox 360

30:27SPEAKERand I think especially early on a lot of games on that platform were you know, either not running at

30:35SPEAKEREven 720p or they did but the frame rate was kind of a mess

30:39SPEAKERLike it was very much alike

30:40SPEAKERFiguring things out transition era right in the same way then 64 was we were just like figuring out 3d on

30:47SPEAKERConsoles period with the Xbox 360. It was like oh shit. We got to do this HD thing

30:51SPEAKERhow do we make this work a lot of smooth 20 and a lot of real iffy you eyes either on the 720p version or on the

30:59SPEAKERSD version

31:01SPEAKEROne was gonna be bad on every game you played pretty much totally

31:04SPEAKERYeah, those occasional games were just like oh, I just can't read any of the text in this game on my TV. That's cool

31:11SPEAKERyeah, so like one of the

31:13SPEAKERfirst

31:14SPEAKERkind of like big

31:15SPEAKERIn-depth projects for Rex glue is coming from the guy who built the framework is gonna be blue dragon

31:22SPEAKERWhich is one of the two mist Walker games

31:25SPEAKERI'm more of a fan of lost Odyssey because it's the more Final Fantasy 1 blue dragon is the more

31:31SPEAKERDragon quest II won. Yeah, but it was a game that I kind of always wanted to play and never got too deep into

31:38SPEAKERYou there are things about it you look at and you're like the UI in this game looks like dev UI

31:43SPEAKERLike it looks like they had to ship it without finishing the the UI it's very weirdly like barren and stuff

31:50SPEAKERBut the develop the developer was like sending me

31:53SPEAKERshowing me some little video clips and stuff of working on it and like

31:57SPEAKERThere are like animations in the game that just didn't play out properly

32:02SPEAKERI guess because they were glitched or something like that and so there's stuff like that that he's like fixing in this

32:08SPEAKERthe recompilation port

32:10SPEAKERAnd it's another game with like a really nice art style to run at like 4k

32:16SPEAKERright because it had this kind of

32:19SPEAKERcutesy, you know, it's a curatorial art the

32:23SPEAKERTextures and stuff are fairly simple, but very bright and colorful. So it should scale really nicely to you know, 4k rendering

32:30SPEAKERSo I'm really excited to see that one come to fruition. I think it's not too far off

32:36SPEAKERbut the the rex lu stuff gets a little bit more complicated than with the n64 where

32:43SPEAKERright now it's sort of this stapled together process of

32:48SPEAKERrecompilation for the CPU

32:51SPEAKERFunctioning but then the GPU stuff is actually using the core of the Xbox 360 emulator

32:59SPEAKERXenia

33:00SPEAKERMmm, so right now they're not actually recompiling all of the graphics stuff into its own

33:07SPEAKERYou know like separate engines, so you're basically not getting the kind of performance gains

33:13SPEAKERFrom the like graphics performance that you would get if you could just run it like fully natively on your GPU basically

33:21SPEAKERBut that is like a long-term goal of the project is to decouple from the emulator. But basically right now they're like

33:28SPEAKERrecompile the CPU we will emulate the GPU and that still

33:32SPEAKERGets us like a game that will run at 300 FPS or something on. Yeah, see which is you know, pretty good

33:37SPEAKERI would love to play chrome hounds at 4k 300 frames per second. That sounds great. Hell, yeah

33:43SPEAKERSo this project is kind of in a state where people are doing

33:48SPEAKERRecomps with Rex glue, but there hasn't yet been a release from the main developer

33:53SPEAKERThat is like the kind of the benchmark for what's going to be doable with the with the system

34:00SPEAKERSo I'm not gonna say it's in a holding pattern because people are doing stuff with it

34:04SPEAKERbut I think we're still waiting for blue dragon to come out to really be the

34:09SPEAKERThe project that like proves what it's capable of and kind of pushes it forward a bit

34:15SPEAKERSo lots of exciting progress, but it's not quite like at what I would call, you know 1.0 yet

34:21SPEAKERWes tell me about the 2dk64 recompiled

34:27SPEAKERSo, yeah, this is what I was alluding to a bit ago

34:30SPEAKERwhich is

34:31SPEAKERone of the I mean the the monkey's paw of it's easier than ever to port a retro game to a modern PC is

34:39SPEAKERWell, what if you just threw?

34:42SPEAKERSomething like the n64 recompiled framework and a game ROM at Claude and said port this game to my computer, please

34:51SPEAKERAnd then five hundred dollars in tokens later. You have a maybe

34:56SPEAKERSemi-functional port of a game there. I think you mean twenty dollars a month. Thank you

35:01SPEAKERThat all of the programmers in the n64 recompiled discord are pointing at and going

35:08SPEAKERWhat the fuck is this slop basically?

35:12SPEAKERSo so there's a slop scene and then there's a handbroom recom scene

35:17SPEAKERYeah, so there's been some drama around projects that pop up using, you know, Claude or other AI coding

35:24SPEAKERYou know, I don't want to say that these I think genuinely it's mostly just people who are really enthusiastic, right?

35:32SPEAKERThey want to play one of these old games

35:33SPEAKERThey either don't have the programming skills or maybe they do but they don't have the time or the inclination to spend

35:40SPEAKERYou know months and months of their life doing this by hand. They're excited about AI

35:44SPEAKERthey're just trying to see if it can work and it does five and bro just

35:50SPEAKERExactly, and it can do some stuff. It can get you a somewhat playable

35:56SPEAKERMaybe even eventually quite polished

35:59SPEAKERYou know version of one of these ports

36:01SPEAKERBut the I wrote a story on PC gamer that when you're listening to this will have been up for a few days

36:07SPEAKERtalking to quite a few developers in this scene who are

36:11SPEAKERYou know staunchly against AI basically and they have quite a few arguments of it against the vibe coding

36:19SPEAKERProcess for doing a whole port and like the big ones are kind of long-term

36:23SPEAKERMaintainability and tech debt if you don't really understand your code

36:28SPEAKERIt's gonna be very hard for other people to understand it the way the AI organizes

36:32SPEAKERIt is not gonna be easy for another person to understand. That means fewer people are gonna contribute to the project

36:38SPEAKERIt means you might not be able to bug fix it yourself because you don't know what it's doing

36:44SPEAKERWhich means you have to pay more money and more tokens every time you're trying to fix stuff

36:50SPEAKERAnd that's all before you get into the ethical

36:54SPEAKERenvironmental issues of using it right well, but also fundamentally like this isn't

37:00SPEAKERgetting the feel right of the game requires a little bit of back and forth and and like

37:06SPEAKERLike those algorithms those functions working the way they worked on the on the old hardware just on the on the modern hardware, right?

37:12SPEAKERyeah, and so there's the the kind of

37:17SPEAKERdisappointing thing tricky thing with it is like I

37:19SPEAKERWant to champion these things when I see a new one and lots of people want to write headlines about them

37:26SPEAKERDefinitely want to make YouTube videos about them

37:28SPEAKERBut a lot of times that coverage is coming out when someone goes oh

37:33SPEAKERI'm doing a recap of X game and then a YouTube video comes out

37:37SPEAKERThey play the first 15 minutes of it the game runs, you know, it maybe has a few little bugs here and there but like

37:44SPEAKERThese games are you know?

37:46SPEAKERdozens of hours long potentially

37:49SPEAKERSo many little things can be inaccurate you could be crashes in so many places along the way

37:54SPEAKERSo it's very easy to kind of have the illusion of one of these projects working

38:00SPEAKERIt doesn't necessarily mean it works all the way through or it might work

38:04SPEAKERBut it still has all those problems under the surface that I was was talking about

38:07SPEAKERRight, I mean this was the experience with emulation 20 years ago to write like in it

38:13SPEAKERYou know when I remember you wrote an article about business on tested a hundred years ago now

38:19SPEAKERwhich was like hey here we want a you know a

38:23SPEAKERCode path perfect path through the SNES emulation, right? Yeah

38:28SPEAKERThat handles the entire thing and and it was feature complete and they were like, okay

38:31SPEAKERWell, we're done with this river gonna look at this again, and I don't think that ended up being true in retrospect

38:34SPEAKERbut but the point is

38:37SPEAKERlike there's always there's always edges that need to be kind of fixed and filed off and and

38:44SPEAKERRepaired especially in the early days on this stuff. So yeah not being able to work on that code seems like a problem

38:49SPEAKERSo the the DK 64 thing you're referencing someone started a DK 64

38:55SPEAKERrecompilation there were a couple YouTube videos about it and the

39:00SPEAKERfolks who had worked on the DK 64 randomizer for years who are you know,

39:04SPEAKERVery passionate about the game know it inside and out got a look at the code and basically went all hell. No

39:11SPEAKERWe're not gonna let this be the project or or DK 64. So they started their own

39:17SPEAKERThey are working with someone who's done some other recompilation stuff

39:21SPEAKERThey know the game from working on the decompilation and you know ROM hacking it and so they put out a an announcement trailer that like

39:28SPEAKERExplicitly, you know part way through the trailer has

39:33SPEAKERYou know some text on screen that's just like no, you know, we are not using AI like no AI in this project

39:40SPEAKERAnd when they announced it in the discord, they said so in very passionate terms. I

39:45SPEAKERMean look I get it. It's it's yeah

39:49SPEAKEROkay, so we talked that a little bit about decompilation too, which I think is equally

39:55SPEAKERLike this is this is a more straightforward thing that's existed for a really long time where you just take existing

40:02SPEAKERExecutables and turn them into code through a series of automatic and manual processes. Is that that fair?

40:09SPEAKERyeah, I don't I don't really know much about the

40:12SPEAKERspecifics of the automatic and/or manual processes other than I think the thing that is really accelerated

40:20SPEAKERDecompilations popping up like crazy in the last few years is the program Ghidra, which I'm not sure if you're familiar

40:26SPEAKERIt was developed by the NSA. Oh

40:30SPEAKERYeah that NSA

40:32SPEAKERAnd now it is an open source piece of software that people use to hack games

40:36SPEAKERWhich is a really weird thing. Is it named after the monster from Godzilla? I

40:42SPEAKERthink so unless Ghidra itself comes from a

40:46SPEAKEROr that's Ghidorah, right?

40:49SPEAKERWasn't that the King King Ghidorah? Yeah, this is like everybody then take a couple vowels out of there

40:55SPEAKERbut but I feel like that might be that name might come from a

41:00SPEAKERyou know, like a

41:02SPEAKERFantastical beast or something. I don't know maybe not maybe they just made it up

41:07SPEAKERIt's very similar to Ghidorah. I wouldn't be surprised if if there's some

41:11SPEAKERCommonality there. Yeah, probably they just took a couple of letters out because that's what be compiling is all about

41:18SPEAKERYeah, I'm looking it up they don't have a name I hesitate to click on it but I'm gonna click on the NSA page about this

41:24SPEAKERand

41:25SPEAKERIt's just a GitHub link. What a perfect honey pot, right?

41:29SPEAKERYou want to use you want to hack software, huh? Oh, yeah. Let me go to the NSA Oh NSA gov slash

41:37SPEAKERGhidra just redirects to the to the GitHub

41:41SPEAKERso yeah, and they don't they don't have

41:44SPEAKERThey don't have a name this like America's Army before it is a is a honey pot

41:49SPEAKERBut hey, if you're a US citizen and like projects like this consider applying to work for the NSA

41:54SPEAKERGreat. I think everybody I think Ghidorah is like it's like the power toys

42:00SPEAKEROf the NSA. It's like oh you made one you did one good thing

42:04SPEAKERLike you've you've destroyed a lot of stuff

42:06SPEAKERbut hey, you made this one great piece of software well done if you let me tell you if you imply that power toys might be

42:12SPEAKERThe only good piece of software Microsoft's made in the last 20 years people get real upset with you

42:16SPEAKEROkay, so so the decompiles though like this is happening with newer games, right?

42:21SPEAKERWe're looking at games from like the game cube and we generations and on this category

42:26SPEAKERYeah, I would say older ones, too. I know folks in like the

42:31SPEAKERFan translation scene use it to hack like ps1 games for example

42:36SPEAKERIt might be kind of diminishing returns of necessity. Once you get into older stuff. That's just like done in assembly

42:44SPEAKERI'm not sure if it's I know people use it for like Super Nintendo and stuff, but I don't know if it's as as

42:52SPEAKERUseful or like necessary for just older systems, but I think for the more complex games

42:57SPEAKERIt's it's a very effective piece of software and and let's see

43:01SPEAKERYeah on this list you have Twilight Princess for both Twilight Princess sports

43:05SPEAKERIt was across Jen for folks who don't remember it was out on GameCube and we is that right?

43:09SPEAKERIt was like yes, the early Zelda for we and yeah, that's exciting. I I want I want a Wind Waker. I want a Wind Waker

43:16SPEAKERRealized that that's a well emulated game at this point, but I still want a Wind Waker. It is currently

43:22SPEAKER71% decompiled. Oh cool. There we go. You you might only be a couple years away from

43:28SPEAKERFrom a port of Wind Waker. There we go

43:31SPEAKERYeah, Twilight Princess was a weird case where it had been decompiled for a good while and there wasn't a port of it yet

43:38SPEAKERand then two

43:41SPEAKERindependent projects started working on ports of it and I think one of them kind of announced and went public first and was getting a

43:48SPEAKERLot of hype and then the other one kind of just came out of the dark and was just like hey ours is done

43:54SPEAKERCheck it out. Like it's out. So which would did they do the Wii version? Did they do the GameCube version?

43:59SPEAKERThey're both the GameCube version, I believe because of the controllers. No, the no waggle version of the game, basically

44:06SPEAKERYeah, I'm honestly not sure why they picked that one. It might be for that simple of a reason. It might be because

44:14SPEAKERthere's something with the Wii code that's a bit harder to work with or

44:18SPEAKERYeah, I'm honestly not sure they might ever really like left-handed link. Yeah, everybody knows that link is canonically left-handed

44:25SPEAKERThat's you know, nobody nobody buys a right-handed link

44:29SPEAKERSonic Advance a game that people are literally beating down

44:32SPEAKERThis is is that is that one of the Capcom ones or is that a is that a different?

44:36SPEAKERI think it was made by Dimps if I remember. Ah, okay. It was not in-house Sega, but it was some some

44:45SPEAKERWell-known developer outsourcer and then the advance there indicates

44:51SPEAKERGBA right, correct. Okay. So yeah, somebody's working on

44:56SPEAKERBecomps of the first two Sonic Advance games and I think the third one is like planned as well

45:02SPEAKERI don't remember which of those is is the best. I think I owned the first one, but people really like

45:08SPEAKERSonic Advance 2 I think

45:11SPEAKERYeah, maybe exciting don't trust Sonic fans. There's a fan for every Sonic game, right? Yeah, that's true distinguishing

45:19SPEAKERMinish cap is a personal favorite of mine. So that's that's exciting to see on the list hell of a game

45:24SPEAKERYeah, that was a progress and then there's some that you can just you can play right now the Jak and Daxter series

45:30SPEAKERFor the ps2 all three of those I believe are now playable

45:36SPEAKERLegend of your goon for the ps1. Ooh one of those kind of I

45:41SPEAKERFeel silly calling it a lost RPG, but you know an RPG that never got a sequel never got any kind of like remaster or anything

45:49SPEAKERYeah

45:50SPEAKERcool, um

45:52SPEAKERAnything else we want to hit on this? I think we've hit the high points here

45:56SPEAKERThere's a lot going on

45:58SPEAKERYeah, I mean you can you can go on my site on read-only memo

46:03SPEAKERI have a page where I'm tracking a fair number of these

46:08SPEAKERI've mostly focused on the ones that are like playable right now, and I'm kind of currently

46:14SPEAKERWorking through in my head how I want to proceed as more and more AI

46:20SPEAKERVibe-coded projects come out. It's it can be a bit hard to distinguish between

46:26SPEAKERThe ones that you know the developer may be like used a bit of AI in the process for bug fixing

46:32SPEAKERblah blah versus like it being a fully vibe coded thing that's never gonna actually be as

46:38SPEAKERGood and stable as you know you would like it to be so yeah trying to kind of trying to figure out how I want to

46:45SPEAKERPapillote those or you know do I want to delete them all together?

46:48SPEAKERI I want to have a good central page that tells you which ones you can play

46:54SPEAKERBut it's just a bit. It's a bit messy right now

46:57SPEAKERSo I'm kind of working through that like you kind of want just the good ones right you want the ones that are just

47:02SPEAKERThat are clean

47:03SPEAKERDo people change the way the saves mechanisms work because it's like this was a particularly punishing error for save mechanisms

47:09SPEAKEROr is that outside the scope of these generally you know that's a good question

47:13SPEAKERI'm trying to think have any of them implemented like save state kind of functionality

47:17SPEAKERI don't think so, but I could be wrong okay

47:23SPEAKERYeah, I'm not sure that that is one thing you definitely get with an emulator right because you can just save the entire

47:30SPEAKERYeah, you know everything that's going on into memory

47:33SPEAKERI'm not sure if that is a is a thing with any of these recomps, okay?

47:37SPEAKERWell worth looking into so you have the page that page is on your read only memo site

47:43SPEAKERYeah, I try to update it every month, and there are other lists, too. If you go to

47:48SPEAKERDecomp dev that is a huge tracker of

47:53SPEAKERGitHub projects specifically of decompilations, so just because some things on this list doesn't mean it is going to get a port

48:00SPEAKERBut if you see something on this list that is at you know 99 or 100 percent completion

48:06SPEAKERThere's a decent chance that once it's done someone else will you know take up the torch of?

48:13SPEAKERDoing a port for it or doing a recompilation or something like that, so that's sort of you're like what to look forward to page

48:21SPEAKEROr if you really like the problem-solving of matching functions in a game you can get involved in one cool

48:29SPEAKEROkay, so next up

48:31SPEAKERWe want to talk about mr.. Stuff. Just just a quick run through what's going on in the mr.. Eye

48:36SPEAKERI'll I'll lead off I guess

48:40SPEAKERMonths and months ago. I asked the community if there was a way to play

48:44SPEAKERThe saves from my mister on my steam deck using retro retro arc or whatever em you deck whatever

48:51SPEAKERAnd there was a project released earlier this week like four or five days ago

48:55SPEAKERAnd I'm finding the thread so I can shout out the person who recommended it that was it was awesome that they did that

49:01SPEAKERIt was from J per four one five in the discord

49:05SPEAKERThere's a thing called the mr.. Retro arc save sync. It's by github user

49:11SPEAKERWani with J U A N I W C K

49:16SPEAKERI'll post a link in the show notes, but basically it's a docker container that you put on your network someplace where you can see

49:22SPEAKERboth your mr.. Saves and

49:25SPEAKERyour your retro arc save folder like a web dev folder that you connect retro arc and

49:32SPEAKERWhen one one changes on one side it automatically does the the tie

49:36SPEAKERIt's like usually it's like a little bit of bit changes that have to happen

49:39SPEAKERThere's a there's a website you can use to do this as well just to be clear

49:43SPEAKERBut this does it automatically and it just runs them through when you make a new one

49:47SPEAKERSo I set it up it took a little bit of finagling S&B Samba permissions and sift stuff and stuff like that on

49:54SPEAKERthe machine that runs docker

49:56SPEAKERbut the the TLDR I also I

49:59SPEAKERalso had done some crimes when I set up the mr.. Because I have I have I have it connecting to a

50:05SPEAKERSamba share on my network

50:08SPEAKERTo pull ROMs so when I want to do when I want to put ROMs on I don't read them off of the SD card

50:14SPEAKERThey're just on a it's like a 2 gig SD card on the device

50:17SPEAKERAnd then everything's just running off the nest in the other room because I never use the mr.. Anywhere, but in the house

50:22SPEAKERSo I had to make sure that my saves were accessible in the network and jump through some hoops, but I got there

50:27SPEAKERThe point is I loaded up minish cap last night

50:31SPEAKERI played a little bit on the mr.. On the CRT in my office

50:33SPEAKERAnd then I saved I got to a save spot or I think that game just has in place saves

50:37SPEAKERI hit the save button and

50:39SPEAKERI turned off the mr.. And I went back and I opened up my steam deck and I connected it to the RetroArch share

50:47SPEAKERsave save share

50:50SPEAKERAnd it just launched and it had my save from the from the mr.. Right there now. It's only saves

50:55SPEAKERit doesn't do save states save states are different and more complicated probably never gonna work because that's like the contents of memory right but

51:02SPEAKERThe saves work and it's rad and I intend to use this on PCs the steam machine all the machines in the house

51:09SPEAKERThey're gonna get this once I lock down the setup. So yeah, that sounds

51:12SPEAKERsuper cool

51:14SPEAKERWith on the process on on either end when you're like picking up your process or picking up from where you're paused

51:21SPEAKERWhat is the like make sure you're loading the fresh save process is that man fingers baby?

51:29SPEAKERLook but you just turn it on and you have to hit a like sync button in the UI or

51:34SPEAKERNo, cuz it's because I'm saving the shit the saves are saved on my nest so and I'm accessing

51:40SPEAKERI'm not doing like I think that probably the same way if you take your machines outside the house and want to play with them

51:45SPEAKERoutside

51:46SPEAKERThe same thing to do is to set up one of the sync utilities like sync thing or something like that and have it just

51:51SPEAKERGrab the latest one when there's a change and have it running in the background

51:57SPEAKERWhich if I took my steam deck outside of the house more often and was gonna play old games when I was outside of the

52:01SPEAKERhouse that is probably what I would do but realistically like there's a hint and

52:07SPEAKERLike this doesn't solve the problem with like playing punch-out on an LCD where the where the latency of the emulation is just slow

52:14SPEAKERAnd it's too hard like punch-out. You can't I can't play punch-out on an LCD. I have to place a punch-out on the CRT, right?

52:21SPEAKERBut it does it does give me a way to play like

52:24SPEAKERRPG I tried playing Zelda to the adventure of link on

52:27SPEAKERThe steam deck and immediately stopped because I was like this is gonna make me crazy the timing on this is too too hard

52:34SPEAKERBut like minish cap was great link to the past was fine

52:38SPEAKERstuff like that, so I mean it's really cool to have the

52:42SPEAKERYou're you're just you're kind of like

52:46SPEAKERTurning the game into the game no matter where you're playing it, right? Yeah

52:49SPEAKERlike there is not necessarily a functional distinction between your ability to play it in bed on your steam deck or

52:57SPEAKERAt the PC or you know on wherever you have your mister in the living room, right?

53:02SPEAKERWell, the mister is actually three feet to the left

53:05SPEAKERSo if I want to play the mister games

53:06SPEAKERI just sit in my office for even more hours a day turns out I was just trying to think of another room

53:11SPEAKERWell, you go to at least three rooms in your house, right?

53:13SPEAKERI have four I have a bathroom that I use sometimes too. So but that's

53:18SPEAKERSteamed deck territory separate handheld for the bathroom. Well, why do you think I have to CRT is the second one's just in there

53:24SPEAKERI'm gonna put up in the corner and get it real steamy. That's probably good for him, right?

53:29SPEAKERPerfect, so yeah, I'll put the I'll put the link to that in the show notes

53:32SPEAKERBut but thanks to J for from pointing that out because I would have missed it would have been months before I saw it and there's

53:37SPEAKERA couple other similar projects going this is the first one that shipped to full disclosure

53:42SPEAKERthe documentation looks like it was written by AI because it definitely has the

53:46SPEAKERrecommended path and all the the kind of the kind of Claude ask

53:51SPEAKERnotation

53:53SPEAKERYeah, I'm looking I'm looking at it now and Claude MD is in the get ignore which means yep

53:59SPEAKERThere's some Claude involved here. Yeah, but yeah, hey if it works and it's simple enough

54:05SPEAKERI really appreciate the

54:08SPEAKERframing of it that you you can use it kind of with whatever your current setup is like it's just telling you like

54:15SPEAKERWe're giving you these two

54:17SPEAKERThese two folders the save is gonna be converted sync it however you want like yeah, that's on you

54:22SPEAKERYeah, do your own thing whatever works for you. That's cool. Yeah, it's pretty good

54:28SPEAKERYou've been fooling around with miss mr. UI stuff though, which I'm super interested in because I'm using the the original UI like some sort of

54:35SPEAKERMr. Caveman, yeah, so I'm I'm something of a mr

54:39SPEAKERNeo fight like you you and Brad have been you know using him and talking about it for years

54:44SPEAKERAnd I've like followed the scene quite a bit by reporting on you know developments for the cores like I've talked to the developer of the

54:52SPEAKERps1 and n64 core and some other people

54:55SPEAKERBut I never like invested in buying one because I was like well, I'm mostly doing software emulation

55:02SPEAKERI like software emulators just fine. I only have so much time to actually play retro games

55:07SPEAKERSo it's really not until the super station was coming out that I was like okay

55:12SPEAKERThis is gonna be when I like really get into using the mr. Moore, and I was kind of holding out for

55:17SPEAKERThe UI that was I think originally probably meant the launch with the super station

55:23SPEAKERBut Taki Udon has just been working on it for a really long time

55:27SPEAKERAnd it's still in beta so all of a sudden the super station is the mr.. The kind of $99 mr.. Clone

55:35SPEAKERSo yeah, I should specify so Taki Udon is a youtuber who worked on it did a bunch of YouTube

55:42SPEAKERVideos around like different retro handhelds lots of like really good reviews, and he got he lives in China, and he got

55:49SPEAKERinto

55:50SPEAKERworking in the mr.. Scene

55:52SPEAKERAfter basically getting fed up with how much like the de 10 nano cost he was looking at it

55:57SPEAKERAnd he's like I work in in around like manufacturing and industrial design and like this thing should not cost as much

56:04SPEAKERSo he launched the mr.. Pie which is what you're talking about

56:08SPEAKERIt's just like a clone board basically of the de 10 nano does all of the stuff that the mr.

56:15SPEAKERWould do it is just a mr.. Basically with some very mild tweaks like different power

56:21SPEAKERYou know USB C for power. I think some stuff like that does it work with the with the mr.

56:25SPEAKERThe existing like ecosystem of mr.. Hats and stuff like that like the USB board and the IO boards and stuff

56:32SPEAKERI think it's almost all compatible

56:34SPEAKERI think there were like a couple things that he changed layout wise for

56:40SPEAKERReasons like I think this will be better that like broke compatibility with like a little bit of stuff

56:46SPEAKERBut like it mostly works okay with all of that ecosystem, so that was the mr.. Pie that was his kind of first step into this territory

56:55SPEAKERHe kind of got some cred from doing that got some seed money

56:59SPEAKERI guess from people buying it and then he launched the superstation one

57:03SPEAKERWhich is also just a mr.. Board in terms of its like

57:08SPEAKERFPGA capabilities, but it's in a shell meant to look like the

57:14SPEAKERPs1 O ne the kind of last model of the ps1 that's this very rounded sleek design

57:20SPEAKERThat's like his personal favorite. He loved that that design

57:24SPEAKERAnd the superstation one is like a mr.. Paired with a very good

57:30SPEAKERVideo board that can just do like all of the outputs that you would want basically so you've got your RGB and your BGA

57:37SPEAKERAnd your scarred and and all of that stuff. That's awesome

57:41SPEAKERYeah, and it's like relatively

57:43SPEAKERaffordable

57:45SPEAKERcompared to like an analog

57:47SPEAKERDevice for example, so it's like two hundred and ten dollars now for the superstation one

57:52SPEAKERI'm pretty sure it launched cheaper than that initially

57:55SPEAKERBut like you you and I know that hardware stuff and tariff stuff has been insane in the last couple years, right?

58:03SPEAKERSo yeah, the world's a nightmare right now. We don't need to yeah

58:07SPEAKERAgain we've talked about it a lot so anyway he shipped this thing

58:12SPEAKERThis year, maybe it was a very tail end of last year when they stopped started shipping out

58:16SPEAKERand

58:18SPEAKERGetting in people's hands now and part of the pitch for it was he was gonna do a mr.

58:22SPEAKERUI that was gonna be nice and graphical and

58:26SPEAKERPut a ton of engineering work into it and basically was like people said it couldn't be done

58:31SPEAKERBut it turns out you know no one just wanted to take on this bitch of a task

58:35SPEAKERYeah, do it so he's still been working on that, but then

58:38SPEAKERSomewhat out of nowhere at least to me. Maybe I just wasn't following this side of the scene

58:44SPEAKERThe folks who work on Zapparoo, which is the really cool?

58:49SPEAKERmr.

58:50SPEAKERLauncher system where you can like use NFC cards and stuff to launch games

58:55SPEAKERThey put out a front end for the mr. And it is very Oh

58:59SPEAKERSimilar in function to the what Taki Udon's been working on aesthetically somewhat different

59:05SPEAKERBut yeah, basically you boot up your mr. And instead of having that you know ASCII art

59:12SPEAKERWould you call it ASCII art UI just like it's not even art. It's just text. It's a test

59:16SPEAKERIt's like a text mode use interface almost exactly. Yeah, you have a kind of I

59:22SPEAKERGuess like modern big picture. UI is the right way to describe it like kind of big chunky icons on a grid layout

59:30SPEAKERpretty simple to use

59:32SPEAKERWhen you boot into a core, and then you you know hold down the button to like go to the mr.

59:37SPEAKERMenu it has a entry now in the mr.

59:40SPEAKERMenu to just pop back to that front end so it's pretty easy to

59:45SPEAKERTo get back to it. You don't get like stuck in the mr. UI

59:49SPEAKERand yeah, it's just it makes it a lot closer to

59:55SPEAKERthe experience someone would get from a more bespoke system like an analog system or

1:00:01SPEAKERYou know a retro art UI something like that

1:00:05SPEAKERYou're definitely still on a mr.. There are some of those kind of like hardcore user. You know pointy edges

1:00:12SPEAKERBut it it is all of a sudden a device that you could like

1:00:16SPEAKERTheoretically give to someone who's not very tech savvy and they would be okay navigating it

1:00:21SPEAKERYou can still choose your audio chip. Do you want on your Genesis though? I assume right? I?

1:00:26SPEAKERDon't think it hides any

1:00:28SPEAKERFunctionality okay the mr. Has I'm not sure if everything is surfaced in the zapper front end currently

1:00:37SPEAKERBut I think I think if you could do it on the mr.

1:00:40SPEAKERWorst case you would have to like boot up the game and then pull up the mr. UI and do it that way

1:00:45SPEAKERBut I think all of the stuff you would expect to be accessible is accessible via the UI

1:00:50SPEAKERHave you have you spent time with either of these yet? I spent some time with the zapper one

1:00:56SPEAKERPocky's UI I used like one of the earliest beta releases for it

1:01:00SPEAKERAnd it was just not ready for like non testing use basically had some crashing

1:01:07SPEAKERIssues it had like you couldn't do update all basically because that would pull

1:01:13SPEAKERFiles that his UI was modifying and that would that would break it

1:01:18SPEAKERI think that's he's since like changed that and fix that and it's getting like really close to I

1:01:24SPEAKERThink still a beta release, but like a public beta than anybody can use

1:01:28SPEAKERBut I basically spent a few hours messing with that one and then was like I'm gonna wait until I can

1:01:34SPEAKERthe the experience that I'm having is like something I can write about basically because it was just too too early really to

1:01:41SPEAKERTo to put in my newsletter, so I was just like okay. I'll like chill on that one and then the zapper one came out

1:01:47SPEAKERSo yeah, I've been messing around with a little bit

1:01:49SPEAKERSeems really easy to use I like it a lot. It's not like the most beautiful

1:01:57SPEAKEROpinionated UI you've ever seen like it feels pretty conventional as a big picture UI

1:02:01SPEAKERBut I think they're quite limited in terms of what you can do on the mister like what the FPGA is

1:02:08SPEAKERCapable of running you know performantly

1:02:11SPEAKERthe one thing I haven't figured out yet using it is

1:02:15SPEAKERSo all the artwork loads in really slow for me the stuff that I scraped, and I'm not sure if it's

1:02:22SPEAKERWhat combination of the mister being underpowered the UI being the front end just being like too slow?

1:02:30SPEAKERImage caching the image files may be being too big having too many games on there my microSD card not being fast enough

1:02:37SPEAKERThe superstations SD card reading not being fast like there's so many elements there that I haven't had time to you know process of elimination

1:02:46SPEAKERGo through, but right now. It's like it's so slow to scroll through the UI

1:02:51SPEAKERAnd get the art to load that I'm almost just like I don't I don't even want the art if it's gonna take

1:02:57SPEAKERSeven seconds to load in an image

1:02:59SPEAKEROkay, look. Let me tell you you need to buy a bunch of little mini like capsule style

1:03:05SPEAKERNess and SNES cartridges you need to buy a big giant bag of NFC stickers

1:03:10SPEAKERAnd then you need to program those NFC stickers and get the thing and also this is important you need to buy a UV printer

1:03:16SPEAKERSo if they're kind of expensive at 2,500 bucks was totally worth it

1:03:20SPEAKERAnd you're gonna buy that so you can print the labels on the cartridges

1:03:24SPEAKERAnd then you're gonna have a perfect thing and also I'm gonna have to borrow your UV printer for a couple hours

1:03:29SPEAKERNo reason nice. Yeah, I see maybe where you're going with this plan. I think it's a great plan

1:03:35SPEAKERIt's a great plan for you. Yeah, it's a fantastic plan. You're gonna. Love it. You're gonna have such nice-looking cartridges

1:03:40SPEAKERIt's gonna be fabulous. I do think those are legitimately sick. I've seen the ones that Steve Kim has posted on on

1:03:48SPEAKERSuper cool yeah, but yeah, it's it's cool that the zapper front end it like works with that stuff and integrates with it

1:03:54SPEAKERBut that's a totally optional feature right like you can just use this as a UI and it is perfectly standalone

1:04:02SPEAKERLook I if I I sent my wife a link to one of those videos, and she's like that's really cool

1:04:06SPEAKERYou're absolutely not buying one of those printers. She immediately sucks me out, so

1:04:10SPEAKERYou were trying to stealth in the reason off we could do this if only we had the printer look

1:04:16SPEAKERHow cool is you could play you could play Frogger anytime you want? It'll be really easy

1:04:19SPEAKERYou don't deal with the stupid mister menu. No it'll take you three seconds. Yeah, you just tap it. It's like. It's so easy

1:04:27SPEAKERYou also I want to talk about mr.. Companion because this is a thing I didn't know about

1:04:31SPEAKERYeah, this I think would probably maybe interest more people in the mr.. Scene

1:04:37SPEAKERThan the UI because if you're just like I'm good with the you know I'm used to the mr.. UI

1:04:41SPEAKERI don't need I don't need a graphical interface

1:04:44SPEAKERMr.. Companion is a super useful app that I thought it had been around for longer than it maybe has but it's been

1:04:54SPEAKERThe updates are coming in for it at an incredibly rapid pace like I thought I thought I had somehow

1:05:02SPEAKERDone something wrong when I was looking at I like was looking an article on retro RGB, and they were using like mr.

1:05:09SPEAKERCompanion version like 6.4 or something and I was like

1:05:13SPEAKERWait I downloaded this and mine is like version like two point something

1:05:19SPEAKERDid I somehow download like you know a version from years ago?

1:05:23SPEAKERNo, it just turns out this thing has been coming along like crazy just since February of this year

1:05:28SPEAKERThat's why I just downloaded like a couple months ago, and it has transformed in that time

1:05:34SPEAKERSo it's basically just an app that you open on your computer and you can connect to your mister over

1:05:40SPEAKERyou know over Wi-Fi or however you have it networked in and just do a lot of the

1:05:45SPEAKERMaintenance stuff and like installing stuff that would just be more tedious to do from the system

1:05:51SPEAKERSo it has a whole interface for scraping all of your metadata and artwork and stuff and loading that on your SD card

1:05:59SPEAKERYou can connect to it wirelessly, and then just say like install Zapparoo install Zapparoo front end you know run update all

1:06:06SPEAKERInstall somebody's like wallpaper pack. It's got kind of a little like app library on it now

1:06:13SPEAKERYeah, it's really really handy. It connects with SSH and SFTP

1:06:17SPEAKERSo you can even use it to look like load ROMs and stuff like that if that's your jam

1:06:22SPEAKERI'm gonna install this they have Linux Mac and Windows versions, so everybody's covered really seems really

1:06:28SPEAKERIncredibly useful because I'm great. I am generally

1:06:33SPEAKERLike I update the mister every year probably whether it needs it or not, and I feel like I'm missing out on some stuff

1:06:38SPEAKERBut also the games I play generally work at this point, so it's okay

1:06:42SPEAKERIt has a save manager built in I haven't messed with that

1:06:45SPEAKERBut you can also see all of your Zapp scripts on there and and modify those so yeah anytime

1:06:51SPEAKERI guess you've found yourself like

1:06:54SPEAKERPauling files back and forth on the SD card or plugging a keyboard into your mister because you need to type something in like this

1:07:02SPEAKEROnce you have this up and running it should pretty much

1:07:05SPEAKERMake it so you don't have to do any of that anymore look

1:07:07SPEAKERI gotta tell you once you get the SSH pipe hooked up

1:07:09SPEAKERIt's it's pretty nice if you love a terminal, but if not then I get that um so let me ask

1:07:15SPEAKERCan I ask you a philosophical question before we before we close out here Wes?

1:07:20SPEAKERShoot okay, so on my mister. I did the thing where I hooked up to the NAS and then I put in look

1:07:28SPEAKERPlatform owners cover your ears for a second. We're past the 30-minute point in the podcast. It's fine

1:07:33SPEAKERI just put complete ROM sets for the platforms that I was interested in on the on the NAS

1:07:39SPEAKERAnd it's kind of a it's kind of not a great experience right because it's like

1:07:44SPEAKERThere's a thousand games in there that I don't want to play in like 20 that I do generally at any given moment. Yeah

1:07:51SPEAKERLike what's your is is there is this a conversation in the scene is this something that I'm hitting because I'm old and I?

1:07:57SPEAKERHave a hard time navigating large menus full of games like what what like what's the solution for this?

1:08:03SPEAKERFirst of all I want to say if you're a cop you have to tell us you're a cop or you download the episode

1:08:10SPEAKERThis is gonna come out on shut the fuck up Sunday, okay?

1:08:14SPEAKERSo yeah, no I I mean I don't I don't know if it's a conversation people have in

1:08:22SPEAKEREmulation

1:08:24SPEAKERRelated discord servers or you know subreddits. I think probably not in discord too much because those servers are like hardline against public

1:08:32SPEAKERpiracy discussions because

1:08:34SPEAKERThey are working on

1:08:36SPEAKERYou know emulators. Yeah, they don't want to get nuked right so they're just like don't talk about it

1:08:41SPEAKERShut the fuck up a very good in your DMS. We have a similar rule on our discord as well, but I think

1:08:46SPEAKERIt's it's a discussion. I feel like I've had with everyone

1:08:50SPEAKERI've ever known who's into this kind of stuff right is the it's not even just emulation

1:08:57SPEAKERIt's like Netflix. It's the streaming future. It's having

1:09:03SPEAKERAccess to kind of unlimited. You know hashtag content at any given time is how much of your

1:09:09SPEAKERBrain space are you dedicating to just that that process of picking stuff?

1:09:15SPEAKERAnd I think it does also put you in a position of like never wanting to commit to something

1:09:21SPEAKERBecause you're just like well. I have this library it creates this like grazing mentality right, so I think

1:09:27SPEAKERYou're you should absolutely cut it down to a few dozen games, or you know what whatever stuff that you want to curate

1:09:35SPEAKERThat experience around is a better way to go so what I've done on the mister is just I have exclamation point exclamation point

1:09:42SPEAKERexclamation point a folder that starts with three exclamation points at the top of the thing that's like

1:09:46SPEAKERTen or fifteen games for each platform, and that's narrowed it down to a place

1:09:51SPEAKERThat is and the irony of course of this is that it's almost all games that I actually own physical copies of it

1:09:56SPEAKERThey're just sitting in the garage, and I don't I can't be asked to get the old hardware out yeah

1:10:02SPEAKERso anyway

1:10:04SPEAKEROkay, fascinating. I would like to hear from

1:10:08SPEAKERYou know folks tech pod listeners who are mister owners and use the mister

1:10:13SPEAKERIf they have a setup similar to yours with the nas like I'm planning to set mine up that way

1:10:18SPEAKERBut I just haven't done it yet, but I am curious if there's a you know agreed upon or a

1:10:26SPEAKERmethod people would vouch for for like

1:10:28SPEAKERHaving access to your whole library of games, but not making that your default experience

1:10:35SPEAKERRight like maybe it is you just have a starred folder, and that's where that stuff goes

1:10:40SPEAKERBut it's it's sort of nice to know like I have the archives there

1:10:43SPEAKERI can dig into them if I want to

1:10:46SPEAKERBut is there a better way to just curate your experience down to a handful of games other than like

1:10:53SPEAKERI'm gonna just copy these onto the SD card and you know have have that manual process every time

1:10:59SPEAKERI want to put you know five new games on there like that doesn't feel like the best solution

1:11:03SPEAKERBut I want something that's not well point it to a folder of you know 10,000 games or whatever yeah the folder well

1:11:11SPEAKERIt's even worse than that because like my stuff is all set up where the because there's a file limit for the folders

1:11:16SPEAKERSo you have to like have multiple like the SNES has five folders or something ridiculous

1:11:21SPEAKERSo it's like a through G and H through M

1:11:24SPEAKERAnd then just s is there all by itself and and part of this was that I don't know if this is still the case

1:11:30SPEAKERBut in the early days of the mister you needed specific versions of ROMs in order for it to work

1:11:35SPEAKERI think it's got a little bit more flexible now

1:11:37SPEAKERSo like even like I do have a retro on here

1:11:40SPEAKERI have pulled my old ROMs and pulled my old saves and stuff off and some of that stuff didn't work because I didn't have

1:11:45SPEAKERThe right like the right bits at this front of the ROM files or whatever like the headers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so

1:11:52SPEAKERAnyway, it's interesting. This is this is it's been a fascinating conversation as always Wes

1:11:57SPEAKERI always love coming on getting to talk to you about this stuff because it's it's fun to get to

1:12:02SPEAKERBorrow your expertise for an hour or so and talk about it

1:12:06SPEAKERYeah, thanks so much for having me on it was a treat. I can't believe that was that our dislike blue by holy crap

1:12:12SPEAKERWhat?

1:12:13SPEAKERWhat where can people find you? What's the best piece people can find you? Yeah, you can find me on blue sky

1:12:20SPEAKERWes dot read-only memo calm is my handle on there and you can find me at read-only memo calm

1:12:26SPEAKERThat's my newsletter and I'm on PC gamer all the time

1:12:30SPEAKERA lot lots of other people on PC gamer, so you'd have to dig dig around to find my stuff

1:12:35SPEAKERbut I'm there behind the scenes editing and and

1:12:39SPEAKEROrganizing and scheming and stuff every day - I did enjoy your did you write the scene drama Donkey Kong 64 poster?

1:12:46SPEAKERWas that someone else? Yep. That was me. Yeah, I enjoyed that

1:12:48SPEAKERI love you know, I you know how I love about scene drama and that one sounded sounded juicy

1:12:53SPEAKERSo people should check that out - go read it if only to be blessed by a screen cap from the Donkey Kong Country

1:12:59SPEAKERTV show that I thought fit

1:13:02SPEAKERFit the subject very well, it seemed apropos

1:13:05SPEAKERThank you as always - Wes. It's always a pleasure to have you by on the show

1:13:09SPEAKERAnd if you don't already subscribe to read-only memo go do it. It's free. It comes out every other week

1:13:14SPEAKERI learned something every single time that one of Wes's newsletters hits my inbox and I

1:13:19SPEAKERHighly encourage anybody who likes playing an occasional old game to check it out now

1:13:25SPEAKERWe've reached the part of the show where I thank everyone for supporting the show because we are listener supported

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1:13:42SPEAKERWhich is full of a bunch of beautiful nerds who talk about interesting stuff all the time

1:13:45SPEAKERYou can also get access to our monthly patron exclusive episode last month

1:13:50SPEAKERI just sat down in front of the microphone and answered a whole bunch of questions that people had said and it was actually a lot

1:13:55SPEAKEROf fun and people seemed to enjoy that as well. So

1:13:58SPEAKERAgain, it's patreon.com slash tech pod. It's five dollars a month. That's five dollars

1:14:05SPEAKERAnd you too can find out how to get access to that by going to patreon.com slash tech pod

1:14:12SPEAKERThis is also the part of the show where we think our executive producer to your patrons

1:14:17SPEAKERincluding in felicitous rips Jordan Lippett

1:14:20SPEAKEROctothorpe bunny fiend David Allen and James kamek. Thank you all so so much. Thanks to everyone who supports the show

1:14:26SPEAKERWe appreciate each and every one of you and we will see you next week with another edition of the tech pod as always

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