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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Thank you for that writeup, I suspect you’re right, that’s probably why a few people are downvoting :)

    You’re not wrong though. It is a little crazy, I admit.

    I have a decent bit of funds saved up to live off of, so I think I could do that for a while, and my company has offered to hire me back if I need (but likely without the aforementioned perks…). Worst case, I could take it and take the step down in comfort/lifestyle and go back to kind of what I’m doing today.

    Earlier this year I had a medical disability thing that hit and put me out of work for almost 3 months due to stress related to my career.

    I had to make a hard choice of trying to continue down this path I was on in B2B, where to get to where I’m at and maintain it is an easy 60+ hours a week plus a boatload of stress consuming my life.

    In the end, I decided to try and follow my childhood dreams. The near death-ish experience has given me a new perspective on what is important and matters to me most in life, before I don’t have any more time left to do it.

    Truthfully, I might be able to ride out the remainder of my days no longer working, if I pull in just a little bit of supplemental income. I own my own home, and have a modest lifestyle with no children and live well below my means. I’ve been saving pretty hardcore for over a decade, and while it’s not enough to live off of forever, it should cover me for a good while.

    Even if this fails, I get a sabbatical from the job that’s killing me, and some new experiences to throw on my resume.

    I sincerely appreciate your concern and advice, and it is well taken. I just don’t know how much longer I can even do my job today, every day is burnout day, I’m hanging in there until next year to get my bonuses and to ensure that my role’s successor-ship plan goes through so my engineering team continues to thrive when I’m gone. I’m also not burning any bridges at work, and for the most part, I’m pretty well respected/liked there so I have no doubts I could come back if I needed in an emergency.

    But for now, onward :) Going to give this game dev thing a try for realsies :)


  • I sincerely appreciate that concern :)

    I am good on funds for a couple years of living frugally. I also grew up poor and you are correct, it does indeed suck. One of the few benefits of having been in the industry for so long and trading my sanity and health for $$ is: I’ve got a decent bit of that saved up. Which I’ll be trading away for survival during this :) If it makes money, great, if not, I gave it a shot and I can always get a job again doing the B2B thing, even though it likely won’t be as comfy as the position I’m in. I’m just totally burnt out with it today. To the point where the stress of going to work caused a major health issue to manifest that’s given me a new perspective on life.

    Thank you for the well wishes! I’ll be checking out your game when it’s released!


  • Heya man, I just wishlisted this because of reading your comments in this post. You’re a good dude.

    I’m a programmer too, been doing it for roughly 27 years. Next year, I’m going to quit my well paying job, where I have a fully remote working position working with some of the most talented engineers in the field for one of the largest privately held companies in the world, a position I’ll probably never be able to get/achieve again in my lifetime; and throw it all away and start an indie studio with my brother and another indie dev. I’ve wanted to make video games for as long as I can remember. This is a childhood dream of mine.

    Life’s too short, chase your dreams while you still can. It doesn’t get easier when you get older.

    Hearing about your passion helps keep me focused on hopefully realizing my own dream one day soon :)

    Edit: I genuinely don’t understand the downvotes? Could someone help me understand why please? :)


  • That is, still, to this day, the only book I could not finish.

    Got about 2/3rds of the way through it and violently set it down. I love books too much to set it on fire, but I wanted to. It was the worst pile of shit I’ve ever read in my life. Completely divorced from reality.

    And she died penniless and depending on the support of the same social services that she demonized in her book to convince people that capitalist leaders are paragons of humanity and the rest of us are just peons.






  • Look, I don’t know what to tell you here. You’re downvoting me (or someone is) because you’re not understanding the point of what they’re doing. That’s ok, but it’s not ok to claim victory here because you don’t understand the point of what they’re doing, or you’re not knowledgeable about the intricacies of the retro gaming/emulation world.

    It’s not to make an emulator for the general public. It’s to take an original board, and put it into a SFF (Small Form Factor) and have a perfect, 1:1 system that can play any Saturn game. Any game. No chipset issues. And it looks like an original Saturn, just smaller.

    This appeals to a very specific set of people who care about compatibility and functionality of the games they’re playing.

    It’s not a general emulator or general device. If you want one of those, you can already build one.

    It’s a thing that does exactly what it says it does. And it appeals to a very specific type of crowd. Which is, apparently, not you. That’s ok. But don’t trash it just because you don’t understand it.





  • Not exactly. Emulating the board and chipset is where a lot of emulation issues show up. ROMs are generally pretty easy to serialize/copy around. It’s the chipset/boards that are tricky and generally requires the boards being destroyed when reverse engineering them to figure out how to emulate the chipset features.

    This would be a “perfect” emulation of any Saturn ROM/Game/whatever.

    That can only be done with original hardware. Emulators get close, but all they can ever get is “close”. New versions of the emulator chipsets come out to address and fix bugs or API issues that are discovered later as additional games are played on the emulator.

    It’s why not all games run on all emulators. There’s a lot of subsets based on chip compatibility and specifically, how close it is to the original thing that will only work on some subset of games; and you might need a different emulator to run the other games for a platform because of compatibility issues.

    So, again, this is not an emulator.

    This is the real deal. Just smaller.

    Running a ROM on it is not emulating. It’s running a game file on the original hardware, and the compatibility will be 100%, instead of some smaller % that an emulated board/chipset would have.