I've been slowly discovering new retro releases for Game Boy, NES, Sega Genesis and more, and been loving to try them out and supporting indi developers. Here are a few I found would love to see what your favorites are.

Walfie's Nonograms (GB): is absolutely amazing for a free game.

Echoes of the Unread (NES): just picked it up, and it looks like a fun platformer with a fun art style, good music, and a cool premise.

After a successful marketing campaign from Sony to go discless with the upcoming PlayStation 6, Nintendo has been rumoured to be in talks with Sony to remove discs with their next home console.

Due to the rising costs of Discs, Nintendo left the home console market back in 2016. The Nintendo Switch was Nintendos first generation of portable only console. While Nintendo at the time said the switch was not replacing their home console, it was reported by former Nintendo of America CEO Doug Bowser that the real reason why there was no Wii 3 was because of the rising disc cost.

With a fully digital only future in the horizon, Nintendo is rumoured to be making a new home console only version of the Switch 2 without a disc drive with the help of Sony. We suspect that the price of this new console will be a very reasonable $959 to not be in direct competition with the new PlayStation 6 which is to be at the extremely reasonable price of $1099.

Ex Sony CEO has said that the new PlayStation 6 would’ve cost $1499 if it had a disc drive so it’s a good to see they are ditching the technology to make it more affordable and better aligned with the profit motives of consumers.

Nintendo and Sony were reached out for comments, but have turned us down as they wanted to discuss upcoming hardware when they are ready.

Thank you rural gas stations

I've been meaning to make new dev projects for a while. But finding the time to sit down to just code is difficult for me these days. However I wanted to make a watch face for my new watch and I just said screw it.

Through a mix of using the Pebble SDK documentation, and referencing a few AI chatbots, mainly GPT-OSS I'm running in Alpaca, I was able to make it, make it run, and since it's in C, I was able to have no memory leaks (according to the logs).

I've uploaded the source code to Codeberg if you want to look at it, I've yet do document it, so hopefully it's not too hard to understand and not a spaghetti mess.

https://codeberg.org/the16bitgamer/poketech-dx

** Notes on my experience using AI to aid in coding **

When I was taught to coding, Google-fu was the goto way if/when the documentation fails you. However with both how old, and incomplete the Pebble SDK docs are, Google-fu wasn't helping since the info it would pull was about a decade or older and mostly out of date or hard to decipher information on Stack Overflow. I would almost say using an AI along with the actual documentation and tutorials was a necessity for me to even finish this project.

The AI wasn't perfect, endlessly gas lighting me, telling me to do over the top things for functions I already implemented, and putting me down rabbit holes going no-where. But compared to what I could get from Google, and it's ability to try and break down what the code is doing, it was a lot more helpful than I thought it would be.

Once upon a time, I wanted to order Light Purple PETG, and the only company which sold it was a GELO band on Amazon. Several years later and I needed more.

While their Amazon listings were gone, their website was still up and their item still in stock. Since it's local I'd thought I put an order in.

This was July 14. My first point of concern was that I got no confirmation email from them outside of PayPal. But I waited, and sent a request for an update on the 16th. Just to confirm the order went through.

I then asked to cancel my order on July 20th, again to no reply, and today I went to paypal to get my Money back.

Stay away from gshop.ca as it's at this point a ghost company, and you'll be more likely to get a full spool of filament from Amazon's Reuse store than from them.

I also got a fossil watch band for it. So far loving it

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The tool I used for it is called the Retrode2, a cartridge dumper which doubles as a 2 SNES and 2 Genesis controller hub.

With a bit of patience you can even run SNES carts on a Steam Deck https://mastodon.social/@16bitvirtual/116479936082268893

Is it cheap? Nope

Is it sensible? Absolutely not,

Was it fun? 100%

The only tell is a slight bump on the seam line of the back. It’s 0.1mm layer heights and 0.6mm thick.

Printed in TPU, I was looking for a solution like this for a future project and wanted to share it with someone.

Now we aren't talking magical improvements. But before the game ran at about 75% (20-25fps), now its more 95-100% (28-30fps). Turn off the frame charts and you wouldn't even notice.

Just wanted to share an idea I had, in order to hope that another developer learns from my lessons, and hopefully either finds a work around or a better solution to this problem.

I wanted to find out if it was possible to locate your iPhone from your watch based on the latency of Bluetooth messages, since RSSI (signal strength) isn't available. I made a simple app, and started sending messages back and forth between my phone and app.

After much testing, the conclusion is no. Mostly because Bluetooth is amazing and the average latency for a message is 58-62ms. And because as Erik pointed out... apple just sucks.

I am hopeful PebbleOS can be updated to see RSSI or the app can expose the notification api to the PebbleKit JS.

If anyone want me to publish my code, let me know.

The raw data is here if you want to see it: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Yr5XX0CXh5TifsnW3yOp10ZoaA_xx0q189f_fG8rMTU/edit?usp=sharing

So I wanted a bag which glows. This lead me down a weird rabbit hole that ended up with 3D printing TPU on top of cloth with a hole cut out of it.

The process was fun and it came close to the original design. Though I would made a lot of changes if I was to make this again.

I also made a TPU foam insert for the strap. Worked well.

Edit: more photos of the bag

This took forever to get right, but all my filament dryboxes are at 10% and I can’t get it any lower.

Started on Friday and it was for the first films 25th anniversary. My local cinema is small and locally owned so it does fun things like this from time to time.

Crowds were small but it was a good time.

Context: I am on a personal agenda to backup all my games myself. In this search I landed on the Open Source Cartridge Reader (OSCR) it was expensive so I held off until a few months ago when I could finally afford it.

When I got it, I also bought every adapter I needed including the Virtual Boy one, which comes as a Kit. I didn’t think it looked bad, which is why I ordered it. But I held off on making since I started getting cold feet.

Today however I got the courage to try and… it was awful. 60 teeny tiny pins needed to be aligned and individually soldered. It was setup so a skilled micro solder could doing the job in an hour or so… it took me 4 hours and scouring the floor finding pins which fell. Let alone unclogging holes which were accidentally soldered.

However after testing my patience and redoing the last step 3-5 times. It works!!!!!!!!

Now I can play Jack Bros without a VB, and Viper on 3DS is amazing.

Shoutout to Save The Hero Builders. I got everything from them and they were extremely helpful with a noob like me.

As U.S. President Donald Trump looks to expand his use of tariffs to pressure Europe over Greenland, the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down previously imposed tariffs. The Supreme Court found Trump overstepped his authority when he invoked emergency powers to bring the tariffs into effect.

Yeah, for the price I was hoping for more. I mean I had a few cool things, like 2 spring loaded flaps to center the switch in the unit. Oh and its new legs are technically compatible with the original Virtual Boy.

But man are the screens and software a mess. The switch is too close for the UI to be fully visible without moving your head, especially with the Red lenses. Plus the screen door effect is so bad here that it reminds me of the first gen Oculus Rift.

It actually made me want to go back to the original VB, but with its decaying 30+ year old displays. Technically the VB wins this one by default.

Wait it also requires an 80/year NSO + Expansion Pass and Knuckles Championship Edition subscription. Which has to be payed yearly.

Honestly it might be cheaper in the long run to buy the original system. Even with the price of Jack Bros.