It’s not technically retro but I’ve found Pico-8 a great way to build retro like games! It’s pretends to be a console of a bygone era and gives a bunch of restrictions on size of game and 128x128 resolution.

The app comes with a pixel editor, sfx and music editor, and a code editor built in. The games are easy to share and you can play them on a mobile browser. On the downside, it costs 15 dollars for the app.

Holy crap! That’s nuts! Hopefully they come back down for you

Has the price gone up? I bought one for each family member a couple years ago when they were getting rid of old stock. They were pretty cheap at the time. What’s the going rate?

Playing the windows version on Linux doesn’t really support Microsoft. It’s not like on the consoles where they get a cut of the sales. Even playing directly on windows isn’t that terrible. I don’t remember the last time I purchased a copy of windows. I’ve been using the same key for like 15 years now

Jesus I hope they win

For what it’s worth, there’s a big difference between a 2 year front end engineer and someone who has been doing it awhile. I’ve worked with both and the product from higher end folks is usually much better. Whether companies know that or not, I’m not so sure. On the downside, the front end stack seems to change every 2 years so it can be difficult to keep up. I’m more of a backend person that writes front end when it meets a need.

Wish I had some advice for him. Best I could say is to jump into some open source work (or pet projects) and make sure he understands whatever framework companies are looking for. It’ll help keep his mental health up, build his skills, and look good on a resume. Pretty sure React is still the main framework. Whenever I’ve interviewed folks I always looked kindly on anyone who could talk passionately about any project that they’ve worked on. He should have someone go over his resume as well to ensure it has the right keywords or at least no red flags (And maybe tailor it a bit to ensure it references what that specific job is looking for) HR is notorious for filtering out resumes for otherwise qualified candidates. Finally, he shouldn’t filter himself out from any jobs. Even if he looks unqualified he should make his resume look as qualified as he can and take a shot. Maybe also reach out to some headhunters. They take a cut of your pay, but it can be helpful to get in the door.

I assume he’s probably doing all of that, but figured I’d type it out just in case.

I’ve been in software engineering for far too long at this point and it’s always been a relatively easy jump from one job to the next. Luckily, I’ve dodged the recent layoffs, so I’m pretty shocked to hear that there is a lot of difficulty in the market now.

Although… some days… a job at Walmart doesn’t seem like too bad of an idea.

Out of curiousity what role does he have? I was under the impression software engineering, despite the layoffs, was still a pretty liquid market.

9 months is a long time. That’s rough. Hope he’s keeping his mental health up.

I love this stuff. Developers making an unreleased game freely available so people can see their art. They even threw in the source code.

One of my friends let me borrow heroes of might and magic. Through being lazy, I ended up misplacing it and it was either destroyed or lost for good.

Years later I bought him the whole collection on Steam.

At the time I was something of a fan boy for final fantasy, but ff9 was the first one I didn’t finish. I played through all the way to the beginning of the end… and then decided I didn’t care and that I was forcing myself to play a game I didn’t enjoy.

I don’t remember having the technical issues you mentioned, but I just didn’t click with the characters and the world felt meh to me. I can’t recall a single song that I enjoyed from 9 either.

X was probably the last FF I finished before the series lost its magic to me. (FFXIV was fun but a bit too costly)

So after a fellow lemming pointed me to the digital version. I threw 10 dollars away to find out… that it appears to be identical to the proto rom (and the gameplay footage).

Plausible more content was added or something, but the early gameplay is identical complete with the “you can’t use this yet”

So, the article appears to be a bit wrong in that… the game was finished ages ago… just no one wanted to invest the money to release it.

Oof I went to buy this and they’re charging a 10 percent fee for ShipAid Delivery Guarantee… I mean it’s a digital copy. What gives? There doesn’t appear to be any way to remove it from my cart.

(3rd times the charm… I was able to get it into my cart without the delivery guarantee. I have no explanation of how it was getting automatically added.)

Nice! I went to that site and somehow didn’t find it! Thanks for the link

I’d like to know as well.

The leak or whatever it is, appears to be fully featured though. There’s at least one gameplay video of someone beating all bosses (without getting hit) and reaching the ending. Presumably they smoothed out a few rough edges. In the rom I played, it would constantly drop weapons or spells that you can’t “use yet”. Implying that you will be able to after you level up.

I am super confused by this. I read the article and then went looking to see if I could buy a rom or something… The gba cart is 60 dollars (oof) and I don’t have anything to play it on. The publisher doesn’t appear to sell roms. The article didn’t seem to mention anything but… there’s a bunch of gameplay videos of this game that have, apparently, been around for years. The gameplay looks pretty much identical to the latest trailer. There is also a rom available from the standard rom sites… that seems to have been there for awhile.

Was this game released ages ago or was it leaked years ago or what?

(I played the rom and it’s…. not great. Mostly just spamming A)

Submit the PR to fix it! The link to the GitHub is right there

I had no idea this was a thing! Thanks for sharing!

Awesome! I just discovered retroachievements for my newly created counter top arcade machine!

I hate watching videos! So I asked some AI to provide a summary.

In this YouTube video titled “The Arcade Game that Crashes Itself for Anti-Piracy Reasons,” the speaker discusses the anti-piracy measures implemented in the arcade game Tempest. These measures include checksums used to verify the integrity of the code and copyright strings, as well as checks for genuine hardware. The speaker explains the checksum calculation process, provides examples of the code used, and discusses how the game detects genuine hardware by auditing random number generation in the POKEY chips. The purpose of these measures is to deter piracy and make it more challenging for hackers to modify the game. However, it is now easier to disable or delete these anti-piracy measures, although finding unmodified versions of the Tempest arcade cabinet remains challenging.”

Pretty interesting that they leveraged how the random number generation happened to determine if the hardware was authentic or not.