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@rygorous I have, sadly, actually seen people do themselves harm by understanding that idiom in the hot-take way.
You still do end up with ambiguity between "yeah, I burned the candle at both ends for this one and will need to recover from it now" on one end and "we set expectations low enough that modestly exceeding them is a sustainable state of affairs"
This week on the blog: a more detailed look at my optimization work for my first SEGA Genesis project, seven years (!) ago. This goes a bit further than my thread last week, and also discusses the tradeoffs of some other classic optimizations that I'm *not* doing.
https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2025/06/28/re-optimizing-the-cca-on-the-genesis/
I tend to work a bit ahead on the blog so that the update schedule stays constant even as my free time does not, but part of that also means that there's still a marked rhythm between writing code and writing *up* that code.
We see some of that here--next week's post will be a more thorough treatment of last week's Sega-vs-SNES thread, for instance--but it's usually kept neatly under wraps.
That said: I've now gotten the *entirety* of that Sega Genesis project where I wanted it to go. Hooray!
@cobbpg I think I'd need an angle beyond "can I make it fit" because generally these projects aren't to play the game but to show off some kind of technique or to explore a new-to-me sort of architecture.
The exciting parts of the TED to me are the way that the current vertical and horizontal raster counts are *writable* but I have not yet found a good resource on taking advantage of the hardware.
More likely I'd rely on one of my other templates to show how to get away with no sprites. :)
@cobbpg That's pretty close to how the Atari version manages the lights themselves. I do also want to animate the button presses, but that will likely end up being a secondary (well, quaternary) revisit at some future point.
The past three posts were a nerdsnipe on the way to the project I was actually aiming to do, so this is mostly just a nice place to pause again.
(There's a whole set of things one could imagine *also* doing with FLI shenanigans, but I'll do *those* on the TMS9918A, thanks)
This week on the blog: thanks to a misclick I post the week's article 12 hours early. I finish last week's revisit of an early C64 project and push the system just that little bit harder to get some nice high-resolution drop shadows and get about as close to the NES version of this project as I expect to get.
https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2025/06/21/lights-out-c64-parity-with-the-nes/
I've been making video games in some form for 20 years, so I wrote an article about my process - and why I don't use an engine.
@joew Definitely feels like it's on the right track, yeah. I have been toying with some ideas adjacent to this for some time, but they haven't gelled into something yet that wouldn't end up picking fights with the entire world at once.
I find myself wanting to weave corporate-consortium stuff like OpenGL and Apache into the narrative more cleanly.
Noel Berry
Ariadne Conill 🐰