SKELUX

@m6502 i anticipate the vast majority of games will work just fine - exceptions will probably be things like 3d engines maybe. i am using plenty of weird novel magic tricks to make this work. plus i have massive brain damage, so i don't have to obey the laws of physics anymore

@BonerLich Oh really? This is super cool but many games require insane amounts of processing and memory because those are not limited, so the idea is to find the ones that can run with the NES specs, am I right? Very cool indeed.

I've got PICO-8 emulation on the NES somewhat working. This could bring thousands of games to the NES library, expanding it by over 10x. The folks making those chinese NES-on-a-chip consoles are gonna love this.

@legoboy7107 the ones i haven't abandoned are this, mario chrous, and the lora internet alternative thing

@BonerLich Dang, how many projects are you working on now?

@vriskahimejoshi rather than actual emulation, I am directly recompiling .p8 pico8 games as native .nes games. This is not game-specific, so should work with any game - though there are still a lot of issues to fix.

@BonerLich this sounds awesome, im curious as to how it works

I decided to take another crack at compiling the Yoshi Story source from gigaleak for native linux play, and actually made a little progress this time. We have 1/4 of a monochrome Nintendo logo.

@Rovertronic Getting hops between different countries is challenging but possible with increased popularity. Even overseas might be doable some day with some mini buoys or something.

@Rovertronic Range could vary anywhere from like 2km to 20km depending on line of sight - not a problem if LoRa is popular enough (it already is in many areas). Speed is very low, I'm simulating 0.8kbps, but even that might be optimistic. Depends on the protocol.

I've been thinking about what this should be called, and I think Radio Web is the most memorable and fitting option - fits in line with Deep Web. Links will start with radio://. A web so deep that it's not even on the internet at all, and is completely free+unregulated.

@legoboy7107 keen to get back onto Mario Chorus, but I had a flash of inspiration to do this, and it is a much shorter project. This feels like something that could actually make a big change in the world.

@BonerLich I pop back here just to check up on Super Mario Chorus progress, only to find that in the past few days you're suddenly doing some insane work making a full-on internet alternative or something?? Wow!

@horsemankukka I ended up compromising a bit - 5-bit characters where bit 1 switches to 7-bit ascii, the remaining 4 bits used for the most common chars (0xff switches to utf8). Coords are 7-bit percentages. Gets tacked on the end of any other image file and rendered as .svg in-browser. .ovl

@BonerLich and still probs has negligible difference in size bc xml is highly compressible and you only like use the same element over and over again

I think the best solution for text in images over LoRa webhosting is to make a companion WebT format, which uses a single packet, and gets auto-imposed over a WebP of the same filename. This packet will store detected text, its location, font etc. Great for memes.

The LoRa webhost has a new .txl format for rendering auto-detected text over images, only taking up a single extra packet of data for most text-light images. Image quality is also improved, now using jpeg xl instead of webp. radio://lchan.node will be real

@horsemankukka probably a better idea

@BonerLich have you benchmarked just svg with image link or embedded + compression

@horsemankukka I had a quick look and jpeg xl does certainly seem to look a lot better at 184 bytes compared to webp. ill try implementing it and see if it works better overall

@BonerLich one problem with webp is that the quality/size tradeoff isn't very predictable and hardcoding quality values doesn't necessarily make sense

Think I've figured out the best way to handle images over LoRa webhosting. Single-packet previews with 0-quality webp, which only load when looked at. 8-packet 20-quality webp, loading when a preview is clicked. 24-packet 30-quality version, only loaded when accessed directly.

@kazumafan46 not really, since cloudflare is internet. LoRa is not connected to the internet in any way, and costs nothing to stay connected to (no bills) since all the hardware is in your own home

@BonerLich can I host mine on cloudflare :D

Here is a webserver simulating my LoRa webhosting at expected speeds. This would probably run faster depending on the protocol, but I chose Meshcore for now since it seems to have the most active users. Free unregulated internet alternative, let's make it happen.

@horsemankukka ill take a look at jpeg xl for sure. the result of slippy.png is expected, since as ive said earlier, it is actually a 478x478 image im using full of artifacts. it would be nice if the 184-byte previews could look better, but webp already does it better than expected

@BonerLich also for photos try jpeg xl. it's already fully supported in safari and being reintroduced to other browsers too. if you were ready to go with bespoke formats it should be fine too. lossy webp is terrible

@kazumafan46 the low quality image fits inside a single packet (184 bytes) and the data is not re-used. medium quality fits inside 8 packets. there is also high quality which you can only view from clicking a context menu item, which stores the image in 24 packets.

@BonerLich does the medium quality image use data from the low quality image or is it completely non-overlapping data? cuz I could imagine an image format wherein you can stop receiving data halfway through and still get a full image (e.g. later data refines the earlier data)