Arisotura's pile of stuff

I'm still alive! Things just have been intense lately.

I mentioned in a previous status update that I was going to start a new job in May, and so I've been doing that. On one hand, it's been great - the folks there are really nice, the work is interesting, it's a good match for my ADHD brain, all is mostly good. On the other hand, it is a lot to take in. Especially the first month, as I was being trained; things are cooling down now.

This also happened to coincide with a lot of personal stuff surfacing, so I had to deal with that too. Having to balance these two things resulted in a lot of mental fatigue, so personal projects have largely been put on the backburner.

Mentally, I'm doing better. There's still work, but I can envision the possibility of happy days. This feels like a moment where a lot of things are falling into place in my psyche. The mental fatigue seems to be subsiding.

I see the change in how I am every day, too. Emotions aren't as overwhelming - they aren't all-or-nothing, and I often find myself feeling different emotions. They're easier to manage. At work, I can see how I find my place within my department. Finding my place and functioning inside a work group was always an issue for me, but I seem to be doing better there, too.

As far as personal projects are concerned...

I picked up a cash register - a Casio V-R100. I was curious about it. It runs Android 2.3, and has some of the standard apps besides the obvious "cash register" app - I was able to play music on it. It was a pain to use though, because the touch panel was damaged and was registering spurious touches. I was able to find a replacement touch panel, but didn't really mess with it beyond that...

The printer board project has been put on the backburner. While it was fun, it feels like the amount of effort I would have to put into reverse-engineering the firmware to get anything useful out of it outweighs what I'm willing to put into this project. So, yeah.

I've also been taking a break from melonDS. My last work was related to timings, and I had ideas like trying to precalculate ARM9 timings, but couldn't really figure out a way to do so that I liked...

I've also been playing on my Hytale world here and there. I don't adventure much anymore, since I've seen most of it already... but I've been focused on building new stuff, making the place nice. I started a large fortress build, the walls are done and I was building a tower in the center. I've also been adding an underground railway system - it functions, but Hytale's minecarts are still janky. For example, depending on the direction, they may derail when being stopped by a block, and they might also phase through blocks. Not too convenient.

Another focus was making the area around my house really nice. I built a nice little garden area for my inner child, as well as a basic tree house. I have some other plans...

This is going to be another gaming post. I plan to post about more technical stuff - the Wii U gamepad stuff would be very interesting to get into. But, one thing at a time.

Some people are saying that Hytale is dead now. I don't agree with this take - the initial hype has died down, but in my opinion, the game has a lot of potential.

I've had a lot of fun with Hytale, but I've been playing it less lately.

One reason is mental health, as that's still complicated... things were good in January, but lately it's been complicated again. The path to recovery isn't linear...

The other reason is that I've pretty much exhausted the currently available progression in Hytale. I've seen a lot of the common stuff. I've accumulated a sizeable supply of adamantite, the highest tier of metal that is currently available. I've collected 200 memories - there are 241 in total as of now, but not all of them can actually be collected in survival mode, and 200 is the last milestone that gives you a reward.

So yeah, there isn't much else to do in the game for me. I started building a large castle, but it's the kind of project that will take a while to be completed. Other than that, there is little direction to the game when you've come to this point, which makes it feel shallow. But that's to be expected of an early access game.

The memories quest appeals to the completionist in me. Same reason why I've enjoyed Super Mario Odyssey - constantly getting sidetracked to collect all the moons instead of strictly sticking to the storyline - and B3313, for example. However, such quests are like an exponential taper: the more you go and the longer it takes to progress further, it requires more work for less returns. This can end up being a motivation killer if too much effort is required for too little gain. After all, this is just a game.

Development of the game is, at this point, focused on building a solid base, upon which actual content can be added later. I think it's a good way to approach it in the long run, but it's a balancing act too - you have to keep your community interested somehow, and purely technical changes aren't that interesting to the average player.

So far, I like what I've seen. The movement and combat mechanics are pretty good. I used to think I wasn't a big combat person, but Hytale made me like it. Exploration is interesting, with pretty large and intricate structures that you can find. The scenery in itself also looks quite nice. I'm a big fan of Hytale's visual style.

Speaking of exploration, however, it does start to feel same-y when you've already seen the most common structures. As of now, structures are based on what they call "prefabs", which are basically pre-built templates for various elements, from trees to entire villages. From what I've read, there are plans to add variety through procedural generation.

It would be interesting to see how they carry it out. What comes to mind is larger structures in Minecraft, like mineshafts and strongholds: those are made of basic blocks (individual rooms, tunnels, ...) which are randomly chosen and placed at specific connection points. I don't know the technical details behind it, but that's the basic idea. It also shows the challenges to generating worlds this way: you not seldom find generation oddities in both Minecraft and Hytale. It's also worth noting that Hytale's structures have a lot more detail to them, so making it work nicely could be more difficult.

I like how the development process of Hytale is woven into the storyline. For example, the "Fragments of Orbis" you can explore are previews of things to come, including, among others, the new world generator. One of these worlds features a dragon bound in an eternal slumber, which is code for "this mob isn't programmed yet". Even though I have quite a technical mind, I appreciate this sort of storytelling.

I'm eager to discover what the developers will add to the game. The new world generator (named Worldgen V2) is looking particularly interesting. From what I've gathered, the generator itself is done, and the task is to recreate Orbis in it. There is also concept art and screenshots showcasing ideas for other worlds, which is interesting.

I wonder how this Worldgen V2 will be rolled out. I thought it would be like Minecraft, where whenever the world generator was changed, you had to travel really far to generate new chunks (and have a visible seam where the new chunks begin), or make a completely new world. But someone else on the Hytale server brought up another possibility: crafting a portal leading to "Orbis V2". I didn't think of that, because I wasn't thinking outside the box of what Minecraft supports. This would be interesting, there's an opportunity to wrap this into nice storytelling.

This is what I like about Hytale. It's an ambitious project, there's so much opportunity. I hope the developers will be able to deliver. As I said in my previous post, I feel that they have a clear vision of what they want Hytale to be, and I hope they can stick to this vision. They want it to be a forever game, and I wonder how they plan to do this without making it a bloated mess.

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In less Hytale-y news, I have a few other things I could talk about.

I felt like trying Infdev+, a Minecraft mod based on the Infdev versions. I've been playing a bit with it, and it's been interesting, though I haven't explored it in depth yet. It's largely nostalgia and curiosity, I must admit.

I also have some basic ideas for a game I'd like to make. My idea is color-based mechanics, where for example collecting an item of a certain color would activate blocks of that color, which could either help you progress further or hinder you. This could also be extended to enemies for example: collect the red item and the red blocks materialize, opening up a path, but the red enemies also become active. I can imagine several possibilities for puzzles and such. I just need to actually build the base for such a game.

Another idea, which Nadia gave me, would be that of a "DS consolizer". A random idea we pondered, that basically consists into turning a DS motherboard into a home console. It's a thing for older handhelds, apparently. Doing it with the DS raises several questions regarding input. I kind of want to try and build something, using a FPGA to add the needed supporting hardware...

However I'm also caught into another big phase of melonDS work, which consists into reworking CPU timings to be more accurate.

So, we'll see how that all goes...

As I mentioned in the previous post, I've been playing Hytale a lot lately, so I figured I'd make a bit of a review post about it.

I learnt about Hytale from Mongster's video. Mongster makes videos about Minecraft Alpha and Vintage Story, which are always nice to watch, but he also gave Hytale a try in this video...

I immediately liked the visual style and general vibe of this game, so I wanted to give it a try. Haven't been disappointed so far.

I knew nothing about Hytale and its complicated history before getting in. From what I've gathered, this game has been in development for several years, has been acquired by Riot Games, ported to a different engine, and eventually cancelled... and uncancelled. The original author recognized that many people were interested in Hytale, and basically bought it back from Riot Games. This meant starting back from the old engine, so several years of development were lost in the process. The game has been released as an "early access" version, so knowing all this, one can't be too demanding.


So what is Hytale about? As I mentioned in my previous post, it's a Minecraft-esque block-based sandbox game, albeit with a RPG aspect. There are three game modes planned: Adventure, Exploration and Creative. Seeing as Adventure mode isn't available yet, I've been playing Exploration mode, which is akin to Minecraft's survival mode.

At first, I went in blind, wanting to discover the game on my own. But recently I started watching Hytale videos too. It's interesting to see how others engage with the game and what they do. I also want to give multiplayer a try, if I can find interested fellows.

It seems typical for Minecraft players to want to start by punching a tree. I did it too, heh. It is technically possible to do that in Hytale, but it's not the intended way to get started. You craft your first tools by gathering sticks, stones and plant fibers. It's reminiscent of Vintage Story, or similarly themed Minecraft mods. However, Hytale isn't focused on realistic survival.

What's nice is that you get started in a sort of spawn structure, which can act as a safe place until you've got a house going.



Some players set up shop in one of the various structures you can find, restoring it into a proper home. I like the idea, it's nifty, and certainly works as long as you can stop hostile mobs from spawning in your new home.



I instead opted to build from scratch, so I could experiment with the various options.



Not the best build ever, but certainly a good start. The layout is very... organic, to say the least. I started with a 6x6 main room and a smaller room to the side, intended to be a workshop. I thought of a second floor for the bedroom, but forgot to plan for the stair to get there, so I ended up grafting it onto the structure. It starts from the back of the main room and runs over the workshop. I quite like this architectural, er, style.

I also underestimated how much space I would need. Turns out Hytale's workbenches are pretty big, and there's a bunch of them. I also ended up digging out a basement for storage.



The bedroom. I haven't really figured out what to use as bedside tables yet, so for now, marble blocks it is.



The kitchen. This was a later addition to the building. It also showcases the Chef's Stove, which is the workbench dedicated to food items. Next to it is a campfire, which serves to cook simple food items.

There is no hunger in Hytale, so food functions a bit like in old Minecraft: it heals you up. Eating food replenishes a bit of health immediately and slowly replenishes some more over time, which is interesting. The Chef's Stove lets you cook superior food items, which replenish more health.


In my experience, Hytale hasn't been hard to figure out, despite the complexity. The organization of all the craftable blocks and items into different workbenches works decently well. The crafting system is pretty straightforward, and the workbenches can also pull items from nearby chests, which is nice - you don't need to load up everything in your inventory first.

That being said, I haven't yet explored every aspect of the game. I think it also helps that I have prior experience with Minecraft, so I don't know how it would go for someone who's entirely new to the genre.


I'm a big fan of Hytale's visual aspect. The scenery is pretty colorful, the designs for the players and animals are cute. I realize it's not for everybody, but I like vibrant colors. I think it goes well with the game's fantasy vibe.

Unlike what some people say, I don't think "colorful and cute" should be "for kids". I'd have a lot to say about this, but it'd be for another post.

You also have plenty of customization options for your player avatar, which is pretty cool. It's neat to see what people make with it. Apparently, you can make custom skins as well, like in Minecraft... The developers even added armor visibility settings, so you can wear armor without it hiding your cool skin.


Another aspect I like is... how to put it? The movement mechanics. Compared to Minecraft, it's easier to get around and explore. For example, you jump two blocks high, as opposed to one in Minecraft. You can even make 3-block jumps by grabbing ledges. In a similar vein, you're also less prone to fall damage. I haven't measured this precisely, but it feels easier to take fall damage in Minecraft.

(EDIT- I did actually measure it, and it turns out you can fall from up to 7 blocks before taking damage, as opposed to 3 blocks in Minecraft. I didn't expect this much of a difference.)

Combat mechanics have also been interesting to figure out. As you go, you find that stronger mobs have more elaborate combat patterns, with offensive and defensive moves. You also get various weapons, which have different characteristics in terms of damage per hit, attack speed, and defense capability. For example, a mace may be a good weapon against a slow golem, but doesn't work as well against a more mobile enemy. All in all, pretty fun stuff.

Makes me think of how I haven't done a whole lot of animal hunting in this game. In my experience, drops from hostile mobs and loot items have proven sufficient to cover my needs in food and leather. It's also possible to capture small animals, but I haven't tried that yet. It isn't yet possible to breed animals, either. Farming is possible, however, and there's some depth to it.


I also have things to say about world generation.

The various biomes I've seen so far are pretty nice. The transitions between different biomes are quite abrupt. The biomes themselves feel small. I don't know if I would consider this a bad thing - there has to be a balance between how large and immersive the areas feel, and how easy or hard it is to get to specific areas. There are options for faster travel, though.

The various structures you can find are also pretty interesting, with many different areas and stuff to find (and enemies to fight, heh). It feels like there's a lot to see.

There are oddities with the world generation, though. For example, I've seen instances of caves intersecting dungeons and causing various oddities. There are also some structures where log blocks break as soon as you touch anything near them, which is probably caused by them being wrongly treated as part of a tree.

I'm not going to go too deep into this, though. The developers have said that world generation is going to be completely redone, so hopefully the new generation addresses those issues. Either way, we'll see what it's like.


All in all, Hytale has been a pretty cool experience so far. It does feel pretty polished for an early release.

At the same time, I feel that there isn't much to it in terms of things to do, beyond getting better tools and weapons.

There is the Forgotten Temple - you collect memories of the various mobs you encounter, and return them to the Heart of Orbis. Doing so unlocks various things, and presumably completing this quest achieves something great, I don't know yet.

This kind of stuff leaves me itching for more.

That's on par with what I'd expect from an "early access" release, though. I believe they've got a pretty good foundation with Hytale, and if taken in the right direction, they can make something great out of it.

I haven't been posting much here lately. Reason is, just haven't had a lot to report about...

The radio was considered mostly good, outside of attempting cosmetic restoration. A friend was making a holder for the "magic eye" tube, so it would properly sit behind its window, but that kind of fell on the backburner... There was also the concern of heat dissipation, I'm not sure how hot that tube gets, but it's worth accounting for.

As far as other projects go, I've mostly been busy with melonDS. I added a cheat import feature, released melonDS 1.1, then went on to tackle the longstanding issue of hi-res display capture. Long story short, the OpenGL renderer wouldn't upscale correctly if display capture was used (as is used to do dual-screen 3D, motion blur, and other fun shit). I started by addressing that particular issue, but the whole project evolved into making a completely new OpenGL-powered 2D renderer. It's been a lot of fun, but also a big project, and I think I need a break at this point.

I've also had kind of a training session for a new job, which would start by May 2026. The training session has been _intense_, but it's also been very interesting stuff. The job itself would be about repairing TV studio equipment, which seems like a good fit for someone like me. I was worried about whether I'd be up to the task, but what I've seen is well within my skills, so that's nice. There is also variety in the types of equipment to repair, so that's good for my ADHD brain.

The other interesting part in this is that I would be paired with their current repair guy - since he wants to have more time for his other projects, he would do this job half of the year, and I would replace him the rest of the time, and that would all be split in 3-month chunks. This is also a special status, which means you receive unemployment benefits when not working, but the job center leaves you alone. When I was told about this arrangement, something lit up in my brain - for me, it could be a perfect way to balance things and avoid burnout. It would bring some amount of change in my life, instead of being kind of a tunnel of "just work".

So, all in all, a great opportunity, and at this point the plan seems pretty reliable to me. It would be a relief to have the whole job situation sorted out.

Other than that, therapy is still going. Mood has been pretty stable lately, not much to report there...

Oh, yeah, minor project, too. A while back, I got a SummerCart to use with my N64, and I wanted to see if I could run B3313 on that. There is a version that was actually fixed up so it would run on hardware, and the ROM was shrunk to 48 MB (from an original size of 96 MB - compare that to the 8 MB of the vanilla SM64 ROM).

I did run into some issues with it, though. B3313 is based off the USA version of SM64, so it's a NTSC ROM - but my N64 is PAL. The ROM runs, but the video is weird - the reds and blues are like, way too bright, and there's weird ghosting. The audio is also a tad too high pitched. The vanilla SM64 USA ROM exhibits the same problems.

Nadia was experimenting with patching the SM64 ROM to try and fix those issues. Her patches did improve things, but the video was still not perfect, still had some ghosting. But then I wondered which issues were from outputting a weird signal over the composite output.

I went and ordered a RGB mod kit for this N64. I guess I'll make a post about it, whenever I'm able to install it.

Another personal post... this time to talk about depression and the relationship I've had to it throughout the years. I hope it will help you, reader, if you're also dealing with depression.

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As far as I can remember, depression started for me around my puberty. Prior to that, I was pretty much living in my own world, and exercising a sort of denial to keep myself shielded from the ugly truths.

But there's also the intersection of trans stuff in there. Puberty was when I started getting those gender feels, which in a way, makes sense, as it was when I started being flooded with the wrong sex hormone.

Anyway, at that point, depression was a background noise for me. I had low self-esteem, felt disconnected from everything and everybody, felt lonely, had the feeling I wouldn't get anywhere in life.

There was also a pattern I exhibited where I would sometimes feel down because of something, feel the need to ruminate it for hours, and I would seek comfort and reassurance, but I wasn't able to receive any of it. It would turn into something draining and toxic, and sometimes lead to fights. There are deep rooted reasons behind this pattern, which I'm currently getting to.

The pattern wasn't new, but being fully depressed gave it a new dimension. Well, there were times where I was more absorbed into something and less depressed, but the baseline was there.

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The first change I saw was when I started transitioning. The hormones made a night and day difference on my emotions. I was able to experience the full spectrum of human emotion. I felt that my emotions were more "how they should be", that I could feel and express them more easily, and also, that I had more control over them, which was interesting.

For example, if I was feeling good, I would smile naturally, which was unthinkable to me before - smiles had always felt forced to me.

But it works both ways. Depression was also more vivid, in a way. I remember the first time I felt down: I cried. I was shocked by that.

Over all, the change made me more whole, in a way. I have a trait which I consider very interesting - I'm very well connected to my inner world, and I know very well how I feel, and generally why. Obviously I don't know everything, but it's still a great help to introspection and in everyday life. Having access to my full emotional range can only improve this ability.

At the same time, depression is something that's so deep rooted that even that kind of ability isn't sufficient alone to deal with it. I lacked proper emotional and psychological frameworks to understand it and effectively act on it. There's a lot to be said about Western education, the overemphasis on external reality (concrete, material stuff) at the expense of your inner world (it's in your head, it's fake), or how we're never really taught how to deal with our emotions, how to get to know ourselves, ...

My view of depression at the time was that it was just how things were, it was part of my life, and I had no real power to change that. To me, it felt like an uphill battle: fighting depression with facts and logic, fighting deep impulses very hard, might occasionally work, but the next time it would strike harder. I felt that I had too little to actually prove depression wrong, which would supposedly get rid of it once and for all.

So it was largely just how things were, for me.

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In 2021, I got an opportunity to try weed. Since I don't smoke, I decided to consume it in edible form. This is worth noting because ingesting weed this way yields different effects than smoking it - it lasts longer, and has more of a psychedelic vibe.

I quickly noticed that I felt different. I was consuming edibles about once a week, or less, but it seemed to be enough to lift the veil of depression. I felt lighter, happier and less plagued by the old depressive thoughts and rumination. I still avoided things I didn't feel confident about, but my mood baseline was elevated.

This led me to the realization that depression wasn't a permanent state, that things didn't have to be this way. I figured out that since my views of myself and the world were different, depression alters my perception. From this point, I was focused on beating depression by proving it wrong, or at the very least, keeping it at bay. You know, fake it until you make it.

This realization was important as it helped me feel empowered to act, and not just remain passive in a defeated state of mind. But it wasn't yet enough...

After a while, the antidepressant effect wore off, and depression tried to fight back harder and harder. The breakdowns would incapacitate me for one or two weeks. It didn't help that I ended up using drugs as an escape - from my own feelings, from boredom.

This doesn't go well. I remember a nightmare I had in March 2022, which was a very clear warning from my subconscious.

( the nightmare )

Following this, I took a break from weed for one month. I was abusing it at this point, and it had adverse effects. The break helped settle things, but the withdrawals combined with real life issues made for very intense depression bursts.

I took drugs again after this, but less often. The fact I had a job helped with moderation, too. But my mindset hadn't really changed. This ended with a very ugly breakdown in November 2022.

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Following that breakdown, I started an antidepressant, venlafaxine. I had tried antidepressants before, but they never seemed to be efficient. I decided to try another one. The onboarding was rough, especially with the insomnia, but I was desperate, so I kept going.

I was also doing therapy, but before that, it felt like building a sand castle, which would be razed by the next wave of depression.

Venlafaxine was efficient. I felt good about myself, about things, my mood was good. I thought the therapy was finally working. I thought I had finally done it - I was defeating depression.

Except it only lasted about 5 months. Then one of the depression topics returned, followed by another. The dam had burst.

Following this, I thought I had to quit my antidepressant, and I did that. There was another reason for that: it didn't mesh well with Ritalin.

But the depression breakdowns returned. I wanted to cling to the idea that it was protracted withdrawals from venlafaxine, and that it would get better. But it did not get better. It only got worse, infact. I hadn't learnt any way to work with depression, and was solely relying on medicine, so that didn't work out.

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Past that point, I was pretty defeated. Therapy didn't make a dent. Antidepressants only worked for 5 months.

I felt that I was just broken beyond repair. After all, if a concrete, radical solution like antidepressants failed, how was I to believe that anything else would work? I felt that my best option was to be on the medication merry-go-round for the rest of my life, which was unappealing.

Following some arguments with internet friends that went very poorly, I decided to try therapy again, with another therapist. But it felt similar to the last time, superficial therapy...

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Things changed when someone told me about IFS therapy. At first, I felt conflicted about it. I thought the model explained things like inner polarization very well, and that it made a lot of sense. But I also thought that it wasn't going to work. After all, if a "real", "concrete" solution like antidepressants didn't work, it was hard to buy that talking to myself would make any change.

The change came with a shift in mindset.

Before, my view of depression was that it was an evil force, feeding from my past experiences to ruin my day, and that I had to vanquish it. I had the idea that depression had to be proven wrong, or at the very least, countered with logic. Unfortunately, it hasn't really worked: depression has its own logic, and even when proven wrong, it will find something else. Or figure out ways to tear down your achievements so they don't matter.

IFS views things differently. The basic idea is that your psyche is a group of different parts with different roles, sometimes extreme, but the parts all have good intentions. IFS provides ways to get in touch with those parts, gain their trust and help them out by providing what they need. There's more to it, but that's the gist of it.

So under this angle, depression isn't so much an evil force anymore. More like parts that are seeking your attention. Much like children, if you ignore them, they tend to get louder.

I find this view to also be very empowering. Now it's not about fighting myself very hard all the time, something which I've always felt was doomed to fail, instead it's about working with myself. IFS also gets to the root of things. In my experience, getting to understand myself has been invaluable. Instead of being like "why am I like this", I know why I am this way, I know that it makes sense, and I know how I can work on it without beating myself up.

But obviously, it's not always smooth. There are parts of me who are scared of what's deep inside, and who understandably try to halt the process. So it can take time to reassure them that it's going to be okay.

Regardless of this, I can already see improvements. My baseline mood isn't great these days, and real life stuff doesn't really help, but depression crises seem much less intense. I don't feel the need to ruminate negative thoughts for hours, or to seek out certain types of negative information. I feel more of an ability to connect with people, and I feel less lonely. That is definitely progress.

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So that's been my history with depression... I hope to be able to continue improving, and I hope this post may be an inspiration to other people. You're not alone.

I finally received the appropriate vacuum tubes for the vintage radio!

I was so excited that I went to the hackerspace the same day, to try them out. I went with a friend who was also quite interested in the radio.

Once I was there, I quickly swapped in my new tubes. I also checked the coil that is connected to the resistor that was burnt, I was concerned that it might have been damaged, but it measured fine.

(EDIT- I realized I've never brought up that resistor, so, here it is)



This is R10 on the schematic. I noticed it while replacing the capacitors. I don't know how I missed it before, because it wasn't caused by my testing, it was already burnt when I got the radio.

R10 should be 2.2 kiloohm, but this one measured in the megaohm range. I of course replaced it, but I was concerned that whatever caused it to fail could have damaged surrounding components, especially L24.

(EDIT end)

Then I turned on the radio. This time, the receiver came to life! It was a bunch of noise at first, but eventually, we received actual radio signals.



We figured out a bit more about how this radio works.

The visual indicator tube isn't very visible, because it isn't aligned properly. However, it works quite well. It indicates whether the radio is picking up a signal, and how strong that signal is. Nifty!

The Selektiv/Lokal switch seems to change the tuning mode, depending on whether you're looking for a radio station or whether you're already tuned in, it seems to change how sensitive the receiver is. I'm not exactly sure how to describe it, but that's the idea...

The AM bands use the "ferroceptor" antenna. There isn't much on those bands, but I was able to receive a foreign station... not bad, considering the hackerspace is in a basement.

The FM band uses the external antenna. We were able to receive several FM stations quite well.

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There is still room for improvement with the radio.

For example, fixing that missing button.

There's also a little issue with FM tuning. Pressing the UKW switch moves a mechanism that lets the tuning knob control the FM tuner instead of the AM tuner, but it's not completely disengaging from the AM mechanism, so it kind of tries to control both. I need to figure out a way to fix this.

The FM needle is also not very visible. I should figure out if I can improve it...

I also damaged some of the art on the front panel when I cleaned it, back in July. It's minor, but I feel bad about it...

And last but not least, we need to figure out a way to mount the indicator tube properly, so it's aligned to the window in the front panel.

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All in all, this is pretty cool. This radio is 67 years old, it was a wreck... and it's working pretty well. Just with new capacitors, and the adequate tubes. That's great!

I'm also not a professional. I have some knowledge of electronics, but this is my first time working with something like this - point-to-point wiring, vacuum tubes, ...

This leaves me wondering what happened to the tubes. It's like someone stole the EF89 tubes from this radio, and someone else tried to replace them. Maybe the ECH81 was moved to the wrong socket, which would explain why there was two of them... weird.

The GT12AY7 was recent, so it's like someone else tried to revive this radio at some point. Probably the same person who added the 3.5mm cable for audio input.

I should have paid more attention to those tubes. Since the other tubes were correct, I trusted them, but I can imagine how such a situation (having completely incompatible tubes in) could cause problems.

I will likely post more about this radio, but this is pretty good for now!

So, yeah...

I still need to post about other projects. The vintage radio stuff is fun, and a nice occasion to learn about different stuff, but it's not all I've been doing lately...

I've also been hyperfocused on the WiiU gamepad again -- trying to get its wifi card's CPU to run custom code, figuring out how to get it up and running and how I could use it as a second CPU for other purposes. My idea was to port lolSNES/blargSNES, my old attempts at a SNES emulator for DS/3DS consoles. I thought the wifi CPU could help with emulating the SNES PPU. At this point, I have things mostly ready, and need to code the actual renderer, but I haven't felt like coding a lot lately.

Sometimes it feels like hyperfocusing on those projects is some form of escapism, to avoid looking at what's inside...

Current situation is, well, not ideal.

Remember this?

"Having to go job hunting certainly doesn't help, because that in itself is pretty depressing. But hopefully, this should be sorted out soon..."

It was not, infact, sorted out. But I won't get in detail in this post, that's not what I want to talk about. Although it would deserve its own post too, eventually.

That does play into my mental health, but that's secondary...

-

What has been surfacing these last weeks is deeper feelings, that have been a recurring theme throughout my life.

( Read more... )

So I almost finished fixing up the tuning strings...

Put the radio back together, as it was time to take it to the hackerspace.

Today, I went there to finish what I had started. Basically, the "ferroceptor" antenna (a ferrite rod with coils, mounted on a swiveling base) is actuated by two thin steel cables, but here that antenna was completely seized. I used WD-40 and got it moving somewhat... then one of those cables snapped, because it was rusted. I needed to get my hands on thin steel cable to repair that... What you find in hardware stores is way too thick. The original cable was 0.3mm or so in diameter.

In the end, I was able to get 0.6mm steel cable for fishing lines. It's thicker than the original, but still does the job just fine. A bit finicky to install, but I got it in place.

Then, while I was at it, I figured I would give the radio a test run.

I hacked together what they call a dim-bulb tester. Basically, connecting the radio in series with an incandescent lightbulb. This way, if the radio has a short-circuit, the lightbulb takes all the energy, in a way -- and nothing blows up.

Combing through the hackerspace's mess, I found a 60W bulb, which was a good match for the radio's 68VA rating. This is important because the bulb also doubles as a visual indication: if there's a short in the radio, the bulb will glow bright, but otherwise it will glow dim. This is also why modern LED bulbs aren't appropriate for this.

For the first test, I removed the radio's tubes and lightbulbs. The idea was to test the transformer alone.

Testing something electrical is always scary for me (and even moreso when said thing is more than 60 years old). I always have some fear that things will blow up. I don't know why, but it seems deep rooted. Most of my nightmares involve something electrical blowing up or malfunctioning in some egregious way.

I plugged the radio in the dim-bulb tester and pressed one of the buttons. Nothing blew up. In fact, the bulb was dim, so it wasn't a bad start. I measured the voltages at the transformer outputs and they seemed reasonable.

So for the next test, I put back all the tubes and lightbulbs.



Again, it was going smoothly, the tubes started to glow...

So far, all seemed fine. I figured there would be issues, but there was nothing egregious. So I went and plugged the radio directly to mains.

I played with the controls, but couldn't seem to receive any radio stations. However, when I tried the audio input, I was able to make the radio play music. It was very quiet at first, but it was something. Messing with the controls eventually got it to a point where it was audible.

We were amused by this outcome. This thing had been left to rot in a basement for who knows how long, then tossed away in the street... not to mention just how old it is. And somehow, it works, to some extent.

Obviously, it's far from perfect. The sound is still quiet, even with the volume turned to the maximum. The controls behave weirdly. I can raise the volume on my laptop, but going too high causes distortion on the radio.

And there's the obvious issue -- nothing came out of the radio receiver part on any of the possible frequency bands. It's a bit of a bummer for a radio.

But atleast we know the audio amplifier part is working. To an extent.



I guess the next task will be to replace a bunch of capacitors. They say paper capacitors are unreliable, and there's a bunch of them in there. There's also a couple electrolytics, which are also likely to be bad. The other capacitors should be reliable.

Heh.

This is a bit of a different type of project for me...

A while ago, I went out to get a kebab, when I noticed this thing that was being discarded near my place:



It looked atypical enough for me to have a closer look... I had never seen vacuum tubes irl before. The thing looked like a radio, but from another age, and in poor condition. I went to grab my kebab, but thought about it...

When I returned, it was gone. I entered my building, and saw it sitting near my neighbor's door. Oh, cool, I thought.

I did have some fascination for that vintage radio. I'm not really into radio stuff, but I find ancient technology like this fascinating, and part of me wanted to see it work, see what it could do, etc... so I texted my neighbor about it.

In the end, he said he didn't have time for it, so I could have it if I wanted... he was going to throw it out, so I decided to take it.



The front of the radio. It's a Philips Ouverture 59, apparently some Austrian model? From 1958-59. The markings are in German. No idea what its story has been and how it ended up here in France. Not sure how far it was actually sold, but it does have a mains voltage selector...

Someone added an audio cable with a 3.5mm jack to it. Seems that they used it to play music. The mod connects to existing connections on the back, which are labelled "schallplatenwiedergabe" (translates to "record playback").

Obviously, this poor thing has been sitting for ages in a basement or something of that sort. It's in pretty bad shape. And dirty.



The back of the radio. It atleast appears to be complete -- the radio is missing some cosmetic elements, but all the electrical stuff is there. All the vacuum tubes are in, but I don't know if they're good. One of them was supposed to be placed behind the front plate, so you could see its glow through a small window, but it was ripped off its socket pretty roughly, and the pins were all bent, so no idea if that tube will work again.



The electrical system, seen from underneath. The wiring is an absolute mess.

Other than that, it doesn't look too bad. There's some rust, and one of the connection support things is broken, but that doesn't seem too problematic... most concerning is that there's a loose wire, and so far, I haven't been able to find where it should go.

The other unknown is whether those 60 year old components are still good. And good luck figuring out problems arising from bad components, short of checking every single one...

The mechanical elements of this system are another story. They're going to need some WD-40, contact cleaner, you name it. Also, most of the tuner cables are broken, so that will need to be fixed too, somehow.

I haven't tried plugging this thing. I'm not going to try until certain things are taken care of (like that loose wire). I'm always afraid, with electrical things, that they will blow up in some way, and I'm even more afraid with something like this.

Although actually, it wouldn't even do anything if I plugged it right now. The mains power is routed through the bottom switch mechanism -- I can see the contacts through which it would go, but haven't found a way to actuate them as to close the circuit. AKA I don't know how to turn this thing on. Or maybe the switch thing is just broken.

-

As I said, I'm not really into radio stuff, but I'm fascinated regardless. I talked about this vintage radio at the local hackerspace, and they're interested in it, too, so the idea is to bring it there and work on it together, and see what we can do. So this isn't going to be a strictly "me" project, but I might post updates about it.

For now, I took the radio apart entirely and cleaned up the parts, because, god, was it filthy.

Now, my idea is to do some basic repairs before we bring it to the hackerspace. For example, the body is largely made of plywood, but it has been delaminating due to moisture. So, through the power of wood glue, I'm attempting to give it some structural integrity.

For example:



The side panels. In this picture, I was done repairing the left panel. The right one is obviously in much better shape, but you can see some delamination going on in the corner. Wood glue and clamps took care of it.

This mostly serves to repair the radio's body so it won't absolutely fall apart. This thing won't look brand new anyway. Not unless we got into professional restoration, applying new veneer, remaking the missing trim pieces, etc...

On one hand, I'm very "function over looks", but on the other hand, it would feel satisfying to pull that off. And I've seen pictures of this radio in pristine condition, and it looks pretty good. But that's another thing...

The next thing will be to do some basic work on the radio system -- repairing the tuner cables, inspecting the circuitry, hopefully fixing that loose wire, ...

So yeah... stay tuned! (heh)

I feel like writing a bit more about melonDS and how I feel about it... if you don't know, melonDS is my DS emulator project. Well, now it's maintained by a small team, but it was originally my project.

melonDS is what I consider my most successful project to this day. It is 8 years old. I can't say as much about any of my other projects, as most of them have either died after a couple years or been taken over by different people after I lost interest, when they didn't just die in the early phases. That's ADHD for you.

This explores some more personal aspects of this project, that I don't post about on the melonDS site.

https://melonds.kuribo64.net/ by the way. It has a lot of juicy technical posts, if you like that. I really should organize it better, make it easier to find certain types of posts, ...

Anyway.

My original idea, back in 2016, was to fork DeSmuME and do my own wifi-related work, away from the team's attitude towards wifi. There's more to be said about this all, but I won't get into it in this post. I'll just say that my goal was to try and get local multiplayer working. Online connectivity (for example, connecting to WFC servers, or using an IRC client) was a mostly solved problem, but local multiplayer (basically any multiplayer mode that doesn't use WFC) relied on more specific hardware functionality, and stubbornly refused to work.

So that was my original idea. Then I looked at DeSmuME's codebase and went, ... nah, I'll make my own, that will be easier to deal with.

At the time, I was also approached by someone else for a joint DS emulator project, but for several reasons (including me moving out at that time), it didn't pan out.

In the end, I was going to have to wait a couple months before starting my first job. Writing a DS emulator seemed like a perfect way to pass time.

There is always a steep curve to starting that kind of project, because the initial phase is mostly about getting some form of CPU interpreter going, implementing various instructions, and there isn't a whole lot of exciting output. But, quickly enough, I got to the point where the DS firmware was attempting to display graphics, so that was exciting.



Some fumbling later, I had a mostly accurate rendition of the DS menu, and could even boot games... I started posting about melonDS and releasing it. At the time, it was nothing but a mere curiosity; the first release didn't even emulate sound. But I didn't care, I was making it because I was having fun. There were other DS emulator projects cropping up, too, so all this helped revitalize the stale DS emulation scene.

Eventually, I felt confident enough in melonDS's emulation capabilities to try going for the wifi quest. I got to the point where two melonDS instances could see eachother when looking for multiplayer games, but couldn't actually connect. But I had some basic infrastructure in place for this.

And after much research, reverse-engineering, hardware testing, implementing various functionality, status bits, etc...



DS local multiplayer was emulated for the first time.

Of course, it was still very crude, and slowdowns and spurious disconnects were not atypical. But it was something.

What I didn't expect was that this would boost melonDS's popularity. From being a mere curiosity, melonDS became "the wifi emulator". I think it was one of the things that helped make melonDS's success, and helped me keep it going, too.

But it also raised very real questions about the design and structure of the project. If I had to make a DS emulator from scratch, I would do things differently, but I had no real idea what to expect or how to make things work when it came to multiplayer. I knew that the protocol used required pretty low latency, but had no idea which conditions it could work under. melonDS was designed in such a way that one melonDS process would emulate one console. When I first added multiplayer, I used UDP sockets, this way it could theoretically work over the network but also with multiple instances running on a same PC.

Wifi support didn't see much progress then, as I was focusing on other areas of the emulator, and also dealing with bad mental health. I was beginning my transition and dealing with a bad living situation, not exactly ideal. There was also another issue: I had no real idea why local multiplayer connections didn't work well. I knew my system for communication was just tossing frames over the network with no synchronization. I didn't know how much this was responsible for the issues, vs. for example, emulation problems. I didn't know how to approach this, as it seemed gargantuan. There had been some experiments, but everything that was tried seemed to make the problems worse or not fix anything.

In 2022 I decided to dive into it and fix it once and for good. It was the local multiplayer saga. I designed a synchronization mechanism to ensure every packet was arriving on time. The first approach was heavy-handed, but the point was to find what works, and optimize later. There were still issues, which suggested there were emulation issues playing into this again. And my research did indeed uncover some issues, fixing them finally resulted in butter smooth multiplayer. No slowdowns, no disconnects.

The new synchronization mechanism was based on a different system for communication: melonDS instances used shared memory and semaphores instead of UDP sockets. Later, the melonDS codebase underwent a great refactor in order to make it possible to emulate multiple consoles within a single melonDS process. Then local multiplayer could just use a regular memory buffer and regular semaphores to communicate, instead of requiring costly IPC primitives. A separate system was built for LAN multiplayer, to replicate the old "play over network" functionality in a more reliable way. It does actually function decently well over a wired network, but tends to fail to work over wifi networks. It may seem ironic, but it makes sense given wifi networks tend to add more latency in a not-so-predictable way.

Regardless, the refactor was a long and arduous task. It goes to show, it's hard work to maintain a codebase and keep it simple and readable, even moreso when multiple people are involved. It would be ironic if melonDS ended up reproducing the flaws that I observed in DeSmuME's codebase that pushed me to start melonDS in the first place. But at the same time, maybe such is the life of a programming project, as it evolves and more stuff is added...

Now, I'm at a point where I don't really know what to do with melonDS... It has given me no shortage of intellectual stimulation and challenge: local multiplayer, online multiplayer, DSi emulation, OpenGL renderer... I could name the JIT recompiler, but it was written by Generic/RDSuck, and I haven't really touched it much.

Maybe I'm just at a point where I need to work on other things. At the same time, I don't want to abandon melonDS. Even if I'm not the only person working on it, people tend to associate it to me, because I'm the creator and also because most of the posts on the melonDS site are from me.

I feel that it's a lot to carry, at this point. We are a small team, but having a somewhat bigger team would make sense at this point. But it's not something we get to decide, either. It's an open-source hobby project.

For example, an idea I've had for a while was to add netplay: basically, make those local multiplayer games playable over the internet, as some other emulators do. I even had a very janky proof of concept at one point. On one hand, I can see the potential this would have: it could be immensely popular. On the other hand, it's also scary for this reason. It means doing more user support, something I'm not exactly good at. It means a complex system in which things could go wrong in many ways. I don't know how well it would even run.

There is also still work on the emulation front. DSi hardware that is still unemulated or poorly supported. A JIT for the Teak DSP would be nice, as anything that uses that DSP causes melonDS to run at 4 FPS. GBA slot addons that aren't emulated. There are also ideas to revamp the emulator's UI, features that could be nice to add, etc.

There is also much cleanup work to do on the codebase still, especially the frontend part. It doesn't help that I hate dealing with this code, and it tends to be difficult to get the team's input on those things...

Atleast I can be proud of melonDS, I guess.