Set Side B

Multiink Monday 3/26/2026

My first Multilink Monday of the year, my concession that I have way too many tabs in my “Set Side B” group and I have to do something to clean them out. Hopefully at least one of these things will hit the right atoms in your brain to induce pleasure, or “trigger dopamine,” in the words and thoughts of a legion of hack game designers. Aid I don’t mean the good kind of Hack either. Let us begin!

Your AI Slop Bores Me is a terrific little game where you can enter a prompt for a bit of text or a drawing, and then it’s randomly assigned to someone else viewing the other tab to fulfill the prompt. Answering a question (in whatever way) awards you “tokens” that you can spend to enter more prompts.

Omedas on Youtube has an exhaustive article about the search for the perfect jump arc in Super Mario 64, the mathematics of determining it, and what people have come up with towards solving this puzzleIt. SOMEHOW ITS 45 MINUTES LONG.
It’s outside our usual subject matter, unless you include all internet entertainment within that scope, but it tickles me so in it goes, the website The Complete Wermo’s Guide To Huttese (and other Star Wars languages). If it had its own post, it’d probably go under my beloved Oldweb tag.

Hackaday has an article about one bright hacker’s work to restore the Wii’s pizza channel (which was never released in the US) so it can order from Dominos.
Finally this is a bit of a selflink but hey, we’re not on Metafilter here are we? An online friend named GothPanda has created a modest little Yahoo-like web directory called Neato!, and I’ve been contributing links to it. We’re up to 63! I’m signed on as a “guide,” so if you contribute links to it with the Add link, I’ll have a look at them and consider adding them! But be warned, this is not a site to stick your SEO links! Nyaah!

rodneylives

A Guided Tour of the NES

This tab has been open on my browser for literally months, so I’m finally excising it from the bar….

A while back the site HackADay did a teardown of the NES, going through how to take it apart and reassemble it, and going through some of the elements of its assembly. It doesn’t go into a lot of detail, but that lets it be fairly short, at only nine minutes.

NES Hardware Explained (HackADay post, Youtube video)

rodneylives

Upscaling Classic Sierra On-Line Adventures

Hackaday’s Matthew Carlson points to an effort to make the graphics in old Sierra On-Line Adventure games better. The graphics in the games in question weren’t stores as raster images, but rather drawn with vector commands, so theoretically it should be easy. But as the video demonstrates, the resolution of their coordinate system didn’t take into account the possibility that someone might come in later and draw the art into a canvas with higher resolution, which causes some weird glitches that had to be accounted for.

Hackaday: Upscaling the Sierras – eviltrout: How classic Sierra game graphics worked (and an attempt to upscale them)

rodneylives