2014 News Archive

Super NES

Posted on November 9, 2014

So I'm finally learning how to program for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. There's a new section for this platform with a port of my NES project template.

Fight for the future of the Internet

Posted on September 1, 2014

For years, there has been a fight between between "net neutrality" and "paid prioritization" approaches to last-mile home Internet access in the United States. ISPs normally make money by charging a monthly fee to the receiver (you), but lately some have been trying to double-dip by also charging both the sender of the information (such as Netflix). Instead of giving subscribers what they have paid for, some cable and fiber telecom providers have chosen to engage in congestion by choice in order to promote their own traditional cable television service instead of over-the-top (OTT) video on demand services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu Plus. These providers intentionally route the OTT service's connections down the "slow lane" to degrade quality of service unless the OTT service pays the ISP a recurring fee. So under paid prioritization, the customer ends up paying the ISP twice: once as part of the Internet subscription and once to the OTT provider.

Proponents of net neutrality have staged a protest against anticompetitive double-dipping on September 10. Many web sites will briefly display a fake loading bar as a symbol of the fight against ISPs' preferential treatment of some sites over others. Pin Eight is among them.

Security

Posted on August 7, 2014

A long-standing mixed active content problem on some pages of this site has been fixed.

The JSNES Arcade

Posted on July 12, 2014

If your PC is fast enough, and it uses a modern web browser, visit the JSNES Arcade to play some of my NES games without having to download and install an emulator.

Wiki scraper

Posted on June 10, 2014

Since Koitsu announced the decision to shut down Parodius Networking, I've been privately maintaining a tool that backs up a wiki that runs MediaWiki software. I used it as a backup plan in case normal wiki migration didn't work correctly, but it ended up proving useful for creating a downloadable static version of a reference wiki. It is currently in use on NESdev Wiki, and now I make it available for everyone to download.

Vandalism

Posted on May 15, 2014

Today, I release the source code of RHDE: Furniture Fight, a game that won second place in the 2014 NESdev competition.