Rassler release 13 is now available

Release 13 of my doomed video game project, Rassler, is now available for download. The dev log has more details:

First and most notably: The Rassler title screen and wrestler / territory select screens have music now! I made it. It’s probably fine? I also created and added a little punch sound effect when you start a new game. You can stream / download the new theme on SoundCloud

Rassler is a pay-what-you-can game. Pay-what-you-can means you can download Rassler for free, or if you’ve got the money, you can buy it.

Finding and exploiting hidden features of Animal Crossing’s NES emulator

While looking for ways to activate the developer menus left over in Animal Crossing, including the NES emulator game selection menu, I found an interesting feature that exists in the original game that was always active, but never used by Nintendo. In addition to the NES/Famicom games that can be obtained in-game, it was possible to load new NES games from the memory card. I was also able to find a way to exploit this ROM loader to patch custom code and data into the game, allowing for code execution via the memory card.

Incredibly detailed and well-written article, goes super deep into reverse-engineering the technology.

Rough.js – A “Hand-drawn” Javascript Vector Library

Neat tool for drawing cutesy vector shapes:

Rough.js is a light weight (~9kB gzipped) graphics library that lets you draw in a sketchy, hand-drawn-like, style. The library defines primitives to draw lines, curves, arcs, polygons, circles, and ellipses. It also supports drawing SVG paths.

There’s a lot of nuance to this, too. For example, there are 5 distinct fill styles (hachure, solid, zigzag, cross-hatch, or dots) and it supports Web Workers with the optional Workly library.

Universal Mega Dumper

Unnaturally tempted by this project, which has created a common platform for cartridge dumping w/ standard adapters for the major consoles. It auto-recognizes which type of cart you connect, too!

The Universal Mega Dumper (UMD) is a game catridge read/writer project designed around a Teensy++ microcontroller. The universality comes from the UMD’s ability to support many different types of catridge connectors by having general purpose 16 bit data and 24 bit address paths along with a dozen control signals – all of which can be customized for each game cartridge mode.

More on the project page.

Retrobatch, a new batch image processor from Flying Meat

Looks like a heck of a swiss-army-knife of a tool. It’s node-based, supports CoreML image classification and sorting, and yep… it supports AppleScript. FM’s suggestions for new use cases contain fun, weird, stuff like “Read an image from the clipboard, apply a drop shadow, and write it right back to the clipboard to paste into another app.”

Retrobatch is available as a 14 day free trial, and licenses start at $29.99. Props to Flying Meat for being one of those third-party Mac development houses that just keeps going.

Bridgesketball, a mixed reality basketball game you can play anywhere

I’ve been working off and on for the last several months on a new project for the Bridge headset, which I’m calling Bridgesketball. It’s a mixed reality basketball game. You can put up a backboard practically anywhere and shoot hoops.

So I’ve promoted Bridgesketball to Project status here on Extra Future Dot Com. The last thing I did this for was la petite url (a custom URL shortener which got broken by some WordPress update or other and no longer works, sorry sorry) so… good luck, Bridgesketball. You’ll find a preview video on the Bridgesketball page as well as a slightly more thorough description, and I’ll add more stuff later. Promise.

The Best Third-Party Carrying Case for the Bridge Mixed Reality Headset

Bridge logo spray-painted on the new hard case. Naturally, I had to customize it a bit.

TL;DR: This is the best case for Bridge


If you work on mixed reality games & experiences for the Bridge headset like I do you might sometimes (ironically, for a super-portable headset like Bridge) have a bit of trouble with getting your headset from point A to point B. The box that Bridge comes in is a great way to store the device when it’s not being used but it’s a little clunky for everyday carry.

Criteria

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying out several different commodity hard cases, using the loose criteria of:

  • Does it securely fit the headset?
  • Does it have room for the charging cables, controller, or other small accessories?
  • Would it stand up to my daily San Francisco commute?
  • Can it be had for under $50?

The Winner

After trying several cases that failed in one way or another (it’s especially hard to find something with the right height), the “Khanka Hard Case Travel Bag for Sony PlayStation 4 VR (PSVR) Headset and Accessories” is the best so far.

It safely and securely fits the Bridge headset, controller, cables, and even the lens spacers in the included bag. I re-purposed the lens bag the case came with as a shroud for the Structure Sensor and Wide Vision Lens while in transit, and there’s even just enough room for an external battery if you’re into that. You’ll have to bring your own padding. I used the thick foam that came in my Bridge box, but any foam or egg crate should work just fine.

CSS Sans

A font constructed entirely by CSS. It is, essentially, a programmatic realtime typeface. I love how it degrades for older versions of IE:

It’s not what I’d consider practical for production use. Still, CSS Sans is a hell of a demonstration of how far CSS has come since Microsoft shipped Internet Explorer 3 in 1996, which was first browser to implement some of the CSS1 spec (CSS v1 was not yet a W3C recommendation).

Why Zuckerberg’s 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn’t Fixed Facebook

Zeynep Tufekci with some strong medicine, for Wired:

In 2003, one year before Facebook was founded, a website called Facemash began nonconsensually scraping pictures of students at Harvard from the school’s intranet and asking users to rate their hotness. Obviously, it caused an outcry. The website’s developer quickly proffered an apology. “I hope you understand, this is not how I meant for things to go, and I apologize for any harm done as a result of my neglect to consider how quickly the site would spread and its consequences thereafter,” wrote a young Mark Zuckerberg. “I definitely see how my intentions could be seen in the wrong light.”

I’ve been seeing the meme version of this passed around these past few days, and it’s sort of incredible how many people think it’s a joke. Nope. Facebook was started by a horny Zuckerberg and his gross dorm friends to rate the “hotness” of their female classmates.

Crunch, an impressive new PNG compression tool for macOS

Crunch is a macOS tool for lossy PNG image file optimization. It combines selective bit depth, color type, and color palette reduction with zopfli DEFLATE compression algorithm encoding using embedded versions of the pngquant and zopflipng PNG optimization tools.

The example images are impressive. Obviously, you won’t want to use this on your archival or source images. I did a quick test on a few of sites at work, and was able to take some PNGs w/ transparent backgrounds down from 1.5mb to 130kb. That’s a greater than 10x reduction in size. Jimminy.

A Selection of Machine-Generated NES Game Titles

I’ve begun learning how to do machine learning. It is extremely complicated, but I feel after just a few days of trying I understand it much better. This python wrapper for tensorlm has made generating results much easier for me. I’ve got my little machine trained on the full NES US release list, and it’s giving me back things like this…

  • Super Super Hank
  • Doobley Dragon
  • Chanter
  • Class
  • Cartlevanina I: The Antiration
  • Kiggt’s Burtman
  • Jet
  • Rome Alone
  • Rock Hart’s Cave
  • Rock Master
  • Masher: II Lands
  • Greeado A World II
  • Pet of Tower
  • Baseball Loaded III

They can’t all be winners.

Vice Sports: The Forgotten Story of the First Black Female Wrestlers

An excellent, necessary, article:

Women’s wrestling was still riding high in the early 1950s and women across the country saw Burke, and no doubt her income, and wanted to follow suit—including a trio of sisters living in Columbus, Ohio. Babs Wingo was the first of the three to start training as a professional wrestler, followed by Ethel Johnson. Johnson reveals in the upcoming documentary Lady Wrestler, directed by Chris Bournea, that the two would take judo and gymnastics classes at the Columbus YMCA on top of their pro wrestling training and strength training.

Women’s wrestling, especially black women’s wrestling, is one of the least-covered topics in the genre. We can fix that. More of this please.

GrayKey: The little box that unlocks iPhones

Thomas Reed, for MalwareBytes:

Two iPhones can be connected at one time, and are connected for about two minutes. After that, they are disconnected from the device, but are not yet cracked. Some time later, the phones will display a black screen with the passcode, among other information. The exact length of time varies, taking about two hours in the observations of our source. It can take up to three days or longer for six-digit passcodes, according to Grayshift documents, and the time needed for longer passphrases is not mentioned. Even disabled phones can be unlocked, according to Grayshift.

Nothing is safe. Encrypt and delete constantly.