About 13 years ago, I made this fella.

https://i.imgur.com/hZYFEmC.jpg

It was a huge amount of fun to build and I was very happy with the result. I hardly play it, but sometimes just put it on and let it cycle through games to fill the house with an arcade-y ambiance.

It started off life with an old PC in it, but currently runs a Raspberry Pi 3.

This!

Coding isn’t for everyone, but sometimes you can get involved in a coding project just by contributing good suggestions/bug reports to github.

Be thoughtful about how you report things - if you’re reporting a bug, add as much detail as you can to help the devs recreate it; if you’re suggesting a feature, make a solid case for why the application might benefit from it, think about potential issues it might solve (or cause), consider how you might address users who don’t want that feature (make optional).

It is extremely satisfying to see an issue you’ve reported get fixed or a feature you’ve suggested get implemented. It gives you a stake in the project, something you won’t often get on the corporate-owned platforms.

Iceland. One of the most beautiful, weird, friendly places I’ve ever visited.

Oh, I love the soundtrack to Final Fantasy XII! The Rabanastre theme always seemed like the perfect non-Christmas Christmas music to me.

I should probably replay Final Fantasy XII…

Outrun, the correct answer is Outrun :)

Final Fantasy VII a close second, though.

Like everyone else, I mostly remember being amazed by both the graphics and the price. Nobody I knew had one, except one guy who acquired it using money he’d raised through, shall we say, illicit means. As such, he kept it under his bed all the time in case his parents ever found out and nobody saw it. Come to think of it, he may have been making the whole thing up…

As mentioned elsewhere, this was the first system I was enthusiastic about emulating.

I’m equally intrigued by the idea of not experiencing nostalgia… :)

I guess the root of it is yearning for a time when things were simpler, but also it’s an associative thing - you remember being happy/content, and you associate the context you were in with that feeling. I had a happy childhood, and I played a lot of games, so my mind links the two together.

“All magazines” to the right of the top bar goes to the same place.

Do you have “Show top bar” enabled in settings? If I enable this, Magazines disappears from the navbar.

I think the problem is that the subscription page (that the script gets its items from) is paginated, and the script will only get the items on the first page.

Ah! It looks like I wasn’t on the latest version… updated and it works perfectly now! Thanks!

This is amazing! It basically recreates my reddit browsing experience and makes the whole site so much easier to navigate!

I can see references in the code to “sort alphabetically” (which would be very welcome!)… but I can’t see the button. Did that function not make it into this version of the script?

Thanks again!

I tried Memori, a Celeste-style platformer with some cool puzzle mechanics. Some of the rooms were super-hard, which made completing them feel very satisfying. It has a chunky-pixel look and controls really well. The front-end UI needs a tiny bit of polish, but other than that I really enjoyed it. Can imagine it’ll be popular with speedrunners.

Yeah, I played all the ones I could find a few months ago… there was even an Acorn Archimedes port!

I just cannot get beyond “rad”.

Doom, no question. I was an Amiga owner at the time, and we were used to being the go-to platform for computer gaming. Then Doom came along and pretty much sent the Amiga scene on a quest for a “Doom clone” that it would never achieve.

I’m nearly fifty, thirty years since I last did a school exam, and I still have recurring dreams about them. Weird, because I didn’t have any stress or anxiety at the time… at least not conscious stress.

My dream takes the same basic form as yours. I am approaching a time when I know there should be an exam, but I haven’t been to the class at all for the year. Mostly the dream consists of me hoping no-one will mention the exam and I can just kind of pass it by default. It makes no sense.

Other recurring dreams:

• I stumble on a previously unknown room in my house
• My Grandad, who has been dead over 20 years, is suddenly alive again. Everyone knows he should be dead, no-one really mentions why he’s alive again, and there’s a weird feeling that he’s hanging around on borrowed time.

How familiar are you with retro gaming generally? If you’re not familiar at all, there are some of the real classics that are extremely playable today:

• Super Mario Bros 3 (NES)
• Ninja Gaiden (NES)
• Tetris (Gameboy)
• Super Mario World (SNES)
• Super Street Fighter 2 (SNES)
• Sonic The Hedgehog (Genesis)
• Streets of Rage 2 (Genesis)
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Playstation)
• Wipeout 2097 (Playstation)
• Tekken 3 (Playstation)
• R-Type (Arcade)
• Outrun (Arcade)

Back when I first started using the internet, early-mid 90s, there was a feeling that we were in control - the users. The giant corporations hadn’t taken over yet, content was all user generated, the apps and early sites were all user run. It was weird, uncontrolled, unpredictable, janky as hell… but also really cool.

Lemmy, and the Fediverse as a whole, feel like that again.

I’m almost reluctant to post suggestions about what I’d like to see on Lemmy/kbin. It feels kind of entitled, you know? It’s early days and there are obviously lots more important things to get stable and established first. Not to mention the devs are doing this for free and about to come under a lot of pressure. As a dev myself, used to listening to users making subjective demands about the “right” direction to take an app, I fully sympathise :)

That said, my offerings for the suggestion pile would be:

1. Discoverability - finding and joining communities isn’t intuitive at the moment. This seems to be a fediverse problem rather than a lemmy/kbin problem, as Mastodon has similar issues. It should be as simple as “search for a topic, hit subscribe”. Instead it involves copy pasting cryptic strings of text, editing them sometimes, then searching, and a bit of hoping. I think this will be the number one issue that impacts adoption.

2. UX - more one for lemmy than kbin, but there are improvements that could be made to the UI to improve user experience. A general tidy up to improve visuals (things like alignment of community names without icons, for example), ordering of lists of communities, external links opening in the same tab (appreciate some prefer this, but it tends to lose your place in a feed).For kbin, easy access to your list of subscriptions would be great.

Honestly, most of the UX stuff is low priority compared to getting the apps stable and coping with scale. I hope they figure out those wider challenges though, because there’s definitely a lot of promise here.