Bill

@RetroTechDadYT @RetroHandhelds CC: @VEsoterica

The PS5 is now a Steam Machine thanks to the Linux-PS5 project. It's now the ultimate console that plays everything including PC Games and Emulation. Let's check out how this all works here: youtu.be/klYCTppC3Uo

Welp

Look closer.

💚Ayn Thor Xbox skin and buttons💚 On Etsy SakuraRetroModding

Another project I work on, which is a city-themed Mario fangame known as City of Drank! For details, you can visit: smwcentral.net/?p=viewthread&… We sincerely invite artists skilled in pixel art to join us: discord.gg/YS6bfysduC #smbx #Mario #fangame

A major tariff ruling dropped, and the follow-up policy landed fast. Here’s what’s changing, what isn’t, and why this is still a moving target. retrohandhelds.gg/our-handhelds-…

Do you remember when you joined X? I do! #MyXAnniversary

@RedArtGames CC: @VEsoterica

We hope you're ready to have a blast! 💥 SUPER BOMBERMAN COLLECTION launches as a physical edition on 28 August 2026! 🎉 Available on PS5, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2 Edition (only on our website!)  Featuring SUPER BOMBERMAN 1 to 5 and Bomberman 1 and 2!  Pre-orders available now 👇 bit.ly/SuperBomberman…

BLOCKED: My amendment to stop the creation of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) that will be used for financial surveillance and control of your wallet.

Without access to players' digital libraries, can Microsoft really say "This is an Xbox"? Nick uses Xbox/360 emulators to fill in the gaps on the ROG Xbox Ally. retrohandhelds.gg/now-its-an-xbo…

@HengshaoH Looks good

Smoother turning animation when holding an item!🐢 #smbx #Mario #fangame (If you're interested in this project, you can visit: smtlod.ct.ws )

** Mega Parodius Update ( MegaDrive / Genesis ) ** 2 vid updates - In the first the Vic Viper players ship is heavily damaged .. only the bomb bay is operational ... so the viper goes on a bomb *blast* processing rampage !! ... This shows enemy destruction and some polishing of the bomb effect. The 2nd vid shows VRAM handling of objects with the tile viewer opened below the gameplay window. You can see objects load in , then as only the burning chests remain those animations are shifted live to maximise free object buffer. Progress since last progress vid : All collisions now implemented : Enemy to Player added , Bomb to Enemy added, Enemy Destruction added. Auto Defragging VRAM system implemented for Enemy Objects. Supports variable slot size also to maximise tile space . Fixed slot sizes wouldn't allow enough slots as they would need to be too large to cover all objects. Without defragging the VRAM would become like swiss cheese after a few screens of enemies also making larger slots difficult to allocate. Vram was getting tight due to things like the Blue Bell Bomb / White Bell text needing a reserved amount of vram ( as they can occur anywhere in the level via powerups ) . Theres also theres quite a bit of variety in Level 1 with warmup enemies , bottle enemies, chickens, crabs, orcas, chests, bees, penguin bathes, walking penguins, bouncing heads etc. We are also using all the arcade assets without trying to cut frames. It can't be loaded all at once so a dynamic system is needed. The enemy object buffer is 444 tiles presently for Level 1 , but the Catboss for example takes 308 when he's onscreen so things can get squeezed. For Mega versions of levels I wanted to ramp things up so that might mean we need more diversity in places than for the arcade accurate option , this system will help that also. The system can stream animation or utilise static animation if vram allows. Seems a mundane thing but sloppy vram management is the achiles heal of GFX diversity in a retro game . To help reduce the Bell effects VRAM buffer , Blue Bomb tiles required reduced to 120 tiles Max ( was 172 ) with no loss of quality . I've also reduced the sprite count by 6 sprites overall - down to 46 sprites used at max frame size. Lots more action / enemies to add yet but particularly the VRAM handling had to be improved before we can implement everything so glad thats in place now. @GabrielPyron and @VTRCHIPMUSIC have been busy with upcoming GFX / Audion for the port , as always I'm very gratefull to have these Masters working with me on the port . #SGDK #Parodius #SegaMegadrive #SegaGenesis

@birt_shannon Looking good

*** Mega Parodius Sega Megadrive Update *** Lately I've been having some fun seeing how far we can push the Parodius game engine . This is not arcade accurate - just for testing, decreased bullet timers and upped the bullet count to see what would happen re cpu usage when things are made a lot busier ! Maybe something like this could be insane mode in the options etc. Since last update we are a lot more optimised under the hood . The C based sprite engine, particularly visibility checking was speedup , overall 25 % faster. Then re-wrote the sprite engine completely in 68k assembly , 30% faster again. It took about 3 days and 1500 lines of assembly , thankfully the gains were worth it. All these gains will be back ported to S.O.T.A also as its using the same sprite engine. Usage is around 19% of cpu per frame with a full sprite load - 33 % cpu left in the busiest frame currently . Parodius is using a write the sprite list every frame type engine , so priority and meta-sprite objects can be handled with ease albiet its still a bit slower than static allocation sprite engines such as the one in lufthoheit but this is a bit easier to code for in the long run. All collision checks are been done , we are using a spatial grid system to get the collision checks done faster than a brute force approach . To get to maximum sprite count destruction is disabled in the video. We hit 80 sprites onscreen in this sequence , the sprite counter is one the Left side. We use about 16 sprites in the top hud and water line , about 21 for player attacks / missiles / shots / options . Up to 35 bullets + enemies . No lazer usage here as the Lazers use zero sprites thanks to the raster tricks , this video is all about the sprites ! Improved the water line when the Catboss is active , as he is Sprites + Forground we are doing some tile rotation tricks eg bit scrolling to give the impression of parrallax at that point . @VTRCHIPMUSIC has updated the stage 1 music again and has made things even higher quality , hes mixed pcm and fm channels together to create higher quality orchestral hits for example . @GabrielPyron has started converting assets from stage 2/3 , some amazing work there . Hes well ahead of me at present which is a good thing. Still lots of incomplete animations missing logic etc , its slow going with RL getting in the way haha and 2 other projects !! Still its fun !! #SGDK #SegaMegadrive #SegaGenesis #Parodius

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** Mega Parodius Update ** The team have been busy over last couple of weeks , implementing more of the games engine. WIP since last update : White Bell power up ( this is the text attack ) Blue Bell power up ( full screen explosion ) Catboss & animating Trees Updated Lazers to work on the BGB layer ( Plane A updated to 64x64 tilemap ) . @GabrielPyron has been doing excellent work on Blue bell Explosion, Whitebell power up text gfx - the slogans are great !! Arcade quality tree animations have been added. Feeding me a lot of videos so we can replicate the arcade port more accurately. @VTRCHIPMUSIC has updated the music to mark IV for stage 1 making it smaller yet again , he's also added the Orchestra Hit in , potentially more samples can be added back in now also as the song now is a miniscule 57 kb. I keep telling him its 2025 - not 1990 for rom sizes haha , a professional is always a professional though !! The Blue Bell power up uses the static large sprite class I made for SOTA where it supports unlimited amount of sprites per object and detects all the reverses / flips & uses the same tile pointers where it can and crunches it down into single sprite object. We use up to 40 sprites in the Explosion but only 147 tiles needed in vram thanks to clever use of mirroring. The Catboss is easily the hardest enemy in the level for a few reasons - we also had to free up Plane A so the boss could shift upwards onscreen, so lazer effects were shifted to Plane B. The bit that caused me the most issues was when he sits in the water line between the two islands. He is quite wide and also has overlapping palettes and animating parts , to do it solely with sprites would have lead to severe dropout at times. At the waterline we have to simulate 3 background planes and sprites at that point and we only have 2 background planes. Luckily the MD sprite engine is very flexible and we were able to recreate the arcade look at this point with some sprite trickery, the water-line is now sprites . So we use Plane A + sprites to recreate him and use a lot of plane animation to reduce the amount of sprites needed. For example the face, the tail the propeller are all plane A animations . I analysed the SNES/PCE versions and we use less sprites than those versions for him so that will help reduce the chance of sprite dropout when attacking. The Catboss is only about 1/2 done , all damage states, the onboard penguin factory, bullets from Cannons yet to added etc. He wraps around at the end of the vid as theres no destruction routine in for him yet . No extra enemies in at this stage , tackling the hard parts first etc. We took the arcade GFX for the Trees that sway around under the Catboss, all the animations are in. There were some DMA bandwidth issues originally I had to sort out as the Catboss has several animating parts + swaying Trees was leading to overload so after some load balancing it all is playing nicely !! We still have loads of stuff to add , collisions are not in - normal enemy waves etc but yeah a lot of future issues were sorting out just getting this far. So the team is very happy with the progress !! #SGDK #Parodius #SegaGenesis #SegaMegadrive #indiegame

** Mega Parodius Update ** Since last showing : Added HUD power up line. Added animating water layer. Added HUD Score / Hi Score & Lives top HUD. Added Missiles - the way they run on the ground and follow hills is pretty cool I think . Added Double shot . Added 2 Lazer segments per Ship / Option as per Arcade , also variable width lazers ( this was a major pain to get working ) - now they can be up to 256 pixel wide. The longer attack is pressed the longer the lazer segment. Still need to add Lazer collision detection with forground, Lazer coding is the gift that keeps giving it seems ! Stage 1 music is on its 3rd revision from @VTRCHIPMUSIC , the Orchestral beat was added via the PSG chip since the last update . Its really a treat for the ears working with Vector !! @GabrielPyron has been feeding me lots of samples for the voices / SFX , also retouching a tonne of GFX from the arcade and early start on Level 2 artwork, which is looking superb ( as usual from Pyron ) even at this early stage. Speedup Horizontal Interupt Sorting routines by converting from C to Assembly for a 40-50 % speedup . Took 3 days but was worth it . Good thing is this will be backported to S.O.TA also. Using nested macros in Assembly for the lazer segments ( there are 10 of them ) I've been able to clean up the Lazer handling code and with the sorting routine speedup its helped as its now handling twice as many lazers segments. Using forground for game objects like we do here for the lazers is much more painfull that it should be due to the forground plane wrapping around. So every lazer segment has to check for plane wrapping boundaries etc. Worst case 10 lazers get split into 20 smaller segments to handle the plane wrapping . Benefit ofcourse is the massive coverage we have with no sprite overloading , I estimate its saving up to 40 sprites to use the FG for Lazers !! Hopefully get some enemies in the next update !! #SGDK #Parodius #SegaMegadrive #SegaGenesis

*** Parodius Update - LAZERS !! *** How many sprites do we have to use on the Sega Genesis to make 4 x 160 pixel wide lazers ?? 10 ? 20 ? ZERO !! Which is really great as when the options overlap all with Lazers using sprites would have lead to sprite severe overload / dropout otherwise. So yes we have some raster trickery going on . I think this might take the cake for the most exotic effect Ive added just for a power up type haha. Breaking down the effect. 1.) Lazer tile rows ( the tile rows the lazers are currently on ) are copied to an offscreen area of the plane . I used the DMA VRAM to VRAM copy mode for this. You can see these offscreen rows just above the Game Videos window in the Plane A tilemap view. 2.) Then a solid block of Lazer colored tiles is drawn at the position of the Lazer horizontally in the offscreen buffer we just copied too - these are 8x8 tiles. 3.) Then onscreen when as the display is being drawn we change to the Lazers row at the correct pixel line offset for exactly 1 scanline then change back to the normal screens next row. I'm using the Horizontal interupt system developed in SOTA for handling the interupts for this. The technique used has been done before on the NES ( Salamander tech demo ) , as usual some of the best techniques come from the 8 bit systems , still it presented challenges getting it working on the MD. These irregular spaced interupts on the Genesis are a little bit of a problem too . All the height sorting has to be done on the frame before. Whats very interesting about the VRAM to VRAM copy DMA (Copy DMA) is it runs asynchronous to the CPU. Normally ROM/RAM to VRAM write DMA (Write DMA) halts the CPU during the send operation but with a Copy DMA I can pipeline one Copy DMA setup while the previous one is copying still . So even though the Copy DMA is 1/2 the speed of a Write DMA with the pipelining and no stalling its probably on par or better in some cases , where a copy makes sense to use. Theres still need some fine tuning , might make smaller lazers with more breaks etc. The Lazers can be full screen width , or narrow as we want so bit of fine tuning here to come. @GabrielPyron @VTRCHIPMUSIC #Parodius #SegaMegadrive #SegaGenesis #SGDK