AI Shuts Down Decomp Community, Sinclair Secrets Released, US Anbernic Ban & More - Ramble 174

Studio Update

Hello there, Ramblers, and welcome to another gripping instalment of Rees Rambles, my weekly podcast all about the latest comings and goings, movings and shakings, and indeed all the rest of it from the worlds of vintage and retro computing, gaming and technology. Hope you’re all doing well out there, and welcome to another weekend. And I thought I would kick things off this week by talking about the weather, which I haven’t done for quite a while. I know all of you out there used to be on the edges of your seats, you know, waiting to find out what the weather was doing in my part of the UK every single week. And to be honest, it hasn’t really been all that noteworthy in recent months, it’s just been hot, really.

But over the past couple of days, it has turned quite a bit chillier. It is big coat season, it’s central heating season, it’s hot water bottle season, or if you’re one of those strange people who isn’t a perpetually freezing lizard person like me, maybe you’re still going around in shorts and t-shirt at the moment. But I’m certainly not, I’m always freezing cold. Although I do happen to live with someone who is the kind of extreme opposite of that. So, yeah, I’m sure we’ll find some kind of compromise, and I’ll just have to wear a jumper in my own home. Could you even perceive of such a thing? Anyway, I have had my fan heaters on here in the studio, at least in the temporary studio. And speaking of studios, I suppose you’re probably interested in what’s going on with the new one. We have had some news over the past week or so regarding the power situation. If you’ll recall, I am in the process of moving from my temporary studio here, where I have been for the past year. At least I was in the office next door. And then I moved to the temporary temporary studio here. Over to a new building, which is much bigger, much better equipped, and going to be an awesome setup, which I’m very much looking forward to. And I have been moving loads of stuff over. But the one outstanding issue is the power over there.

It used to be a cake factory. It has a big electricity substation in there that used to power all of their machinery and stuff. That’s all been decommissioned and disconnected. And the current landlord doesn’t want to pay an absolute fortune to get all of that back up and running, when ultimately all he needs is some sockets and some lights. And that’s pretty much it. So it is being hooked back up to a normal commercial grade, whatever it is, mains power supply. But that is going to involve digging the road up and apparently relaying some kind of cable that was taken out when the substation… I don’t really understand how these things work.

But it does have a price for that and does have all the official go-ahead and everything from National Grid. So that will be happening at some point in the very near future. And that’s quite exciting news. It means that hopefully we’ll be able to get the studio up and running. I do have a temporary solution in there just to get the lights on so at least I can keep getting stuff moved over.

And of course, in the meantime, Rees Rambles will continue here every single week on a Friday. As it has been, or at least mostly has been. Unfortunately, the main studio is out of commission at the moment. And I really want to get back onto those main channel videos. And I am actually filming a bit of a project that I’m working on at the moment that I have dubbed the Fire Hazard. It’s a thing that I’m designing and building. It’s an electronics, electrical thing, kind of tied into the whole solar thing that I was doing a few years ago back in 2022, if you remember that.

And I’ve been quite enjoying that. And it’s going to be quite useful in the new studio as well as kind of a temporary power solution. And I have been recording, as mentioned, the kind of the 3D printing side of things and the electrical design and wiring side of things. So I’m probably going to edit that up into some kind of video and at least make an attempt at doing something because I’m going a bit stir crazy here. I want to get back onto my main channel videos.

Anyway, with all of that preamble out of the way, I suppose we should get on with the videos for this week’s ramble. But first, of course, as it’s an alternating week, a little message regarding a rather special someone who makes all of this possible.

PCBWay

And if you hadn’t guessed it, that special someone is, of course, our ongoing long-term sponsor, PCBWay.com, who you may be familiar with already thanks to their 12 plus years of experience in the PCB fabrication business, in which time they have built up quite the enviable reputation for fast turnaround times, high quality and excellent customer service. But today they have asked me to let you know about their additional services. Services including, but not limited to, CNC machining, injection moulding, sheet metal fabrication and 3D printing. So if any of those are of interest for your next project, please do check out the link to PCBWay down in the description.

And thanks once again to PCBWay.com for all of your ongoing support for both Rees Rambles and my main channel, ctrl-alt-rees.

Major Decompilation Community Shuts Down Thanks To AI

So my first story for this week is quite a big one, and it does draw together the various threads that we have been weaving over recent weeks and months here on Rees Rambles. Stuff to do with game preservation, with porting, with decompilation, recompilation, and with the massive effect, both positive and negative, that these new AI, LLM, agentic coding tools have had. On that world, and indeed, the wider world of development in general. You know, I’ve seen it myself, I work in that industry.

You can’t deny the huge negative impacts of these tools. You know, the insane power consumption and the, you know, the job losses across various different industries. And, you know, I think it’s fair to say that they are revolutionary. They are being massively misused at the moment. But I like to try to kind of keep a balanced view on these things and, you know, longer term, hopefully once the technology is refined and improved, perhaps we can find some, you know, some legitimate kind of ongoing uses for these tools where they will actually make our lives easier. You know, we’ve had this before. We’ve had it with, you know, the industrial revolution and with computers themselves and with the internet and, you know, mobile technology and stuff.

And it’s, you know, it is kind of the whole cycle, I guess. And all I can do is sit here and report on it. I don’t want to make this an AI-themed podcast every week, but it is having a massive impact on our industry and our hobby, ultimately. And that is something that I do at least need to acknowledge. Now, this story is one that has been posted to my Discord server this week. And it’s one that has prompted quite a lot of discussion and quite rightly so, because unfortunately we have lost another great site and another great community as a result of these tools.

So, without further ado, this is 404media.co: “Video game reverse engineering community shuts down because AI has made it too easy.” Now, before I go into the actual story itself on 404media by Jason Koebler, presumably handwritten by an actual human, we would hope, I am going to just take a moment to talk about this community. So, this is decomp.dev. Now, I have talked about decompilation quite a bit over the past, certainly over the past few months, as kind of a means to an end, kind of a tool. So, if you’re not familiar with decompilation, essentially we take the finished game code. I know I’ve talked about this before, but hey, there’s probably new people out there.

We take the finished game code or the ROM file or whatever that you load on your console or your computer, or indeed not just games. Obviously, we have software applications. I talked about the Adobe suite being cloned last week by these tools and Office as well. But specifically, we’re talking about games here. We take the game code, getting to the point, Rees, and we turn it back into source code. Now, we can’t turn it back to the original source code as written by the game’s developers in the first place. That isn’t really technically possible. But we can turn it back into something very closely resembling that in whatever language we choose, and something that ultimately compiles back into the same finished product. That is kind of the gold standard when it comes to decompilation and recompilation.

And I have talked at length in the past about how these tools can be used for modern usability improvements. You know, we can get older games and we can add widescreen support, or we can, you know, patch around things like servers that have been taken offline and all of that stuff. And in that case, you know, they are very useful for game preservation and also just allowing people to kind of enjoy these games. Now, the systems that support them perhaps aren’t, you know, aren’t around anymore or becoming rarer and failing.

And also, I’ve talked about decompilation and recompilation as a tool to allow us to port games to completely different systems. You can take the finished game code from one platform, turn it back into source code, modify that source code into something that runs on a completely different platform, and then recompile it for that platform and basically keep the same game logic and the same assets and stuff so the game kind of plays the same and feels the same within the limitations of the new platform.

Really, really useful process. What I hadn’t considered is just decompilation for decompilation’s sake. And I kind of wanted to talk about that for a while because having looked into decomp.dev, I think this is something that kind of passed me by because, of course, taking a finished product, you know, a black box, an opaque thing like finished compiled game code and turning it back into its original source code just to see how it works is actually really interesting. You know, it’s a perfectly legitimate use of this technology and probably the original use of this technology. Of course, it’s step one before you can do literally anything else with it.

And that is what decomp.dev was actually all about. It was a community of people who took games and decompiled them, turned them back into code just to see how they worked and just to compare notes and kind of chat amongst themselves and say, oh, you know, I’ve discovered this, you know, this interesting programming trick in this game. And, you know, perhaps we could learn from this and apply it to our own game developments in future. And I think that’s actually really, really interesting. And that’s kind of what makes it quite, quite sad that we have lost this great community because they just can’t differentiate between human decompilations and AI driven decompilations. And it does kind of completely and utterly just defeat the entire point of what the community was all about.

So that is kind of my take on this. Just going back to the story on 404media.co, here written by Jason Koebler, of course. A website that was dedicated to the human endeavour of reverse engineering, decompiling and modifying video games is shutting down because people using AI to clone and decompile games have fully overrun the community and are far outpacing what human software engineers alone can do. The news comes as AI-coded clones of popular enterprise software like the Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office have gone viral and are seemingly popping up every day. And as people in video game modding communities warn that AI decomps are everywhere. The website decomp.dev said Thursday that it is shutting down because the community aspect of decompilation has been broken by AI and that projects that once required intense collaboration between people with different skills can now be done trivially with AI.

The administrator of the website said that it has become impossible to keep track of which projects are primarily human led and which ones are done by AI. And the story quotes, “Historically, matching decompilation has been a brutally difficult, time-consuming task on the scale of years for any moderately sized game with a number of active contributors,” the pseudonymous admin of decomp.dev, who goes by Encounter, wrote on the site. But recent frontier AI models like GPT-6-Astra have made it trivially easy to decompile a game. “They are significantly better at following complex directions, cross-referencing resources for symbols or debug information, and writing natural code with enough guidance,” Encounter wrote. “It is now clear that with the right guidance, human input and code reviews, AI can expedite the decompilation process in a significant way. What is also now clear is that the community aspect of decompilation has been broken.”

And the story goes on to talk a little bit about what the site was about, which of course I’ve also just covered, and also kind of mentioned a few projects as well that kind of have come about as a result of this technology. I mean, I have mentioned at length in the past few weeks that I get sent an awful lot of these and I just genuinely don’t know how to cover them. You know, I tend to just stick to the noteworthy things like that horrifically bad Knuckles game that I talked about. “The end of decomp.dev is symptomatic of a broader, potentially destabilising trend in AI. It has become trivially easy for people to use AI to make functional clones of software that live in a copyright grey zone.”

And onwards and onwards. Anyway, I will link to this story down below in the description, as mentioned, and as I, of course, will do with all of the stories that I talk about every week here at Rees Rambles. If we add a little bit more, just to go back to decomp.dev, they are requesting that you don’t make your own fork of decomp.dev. It has never been licensed under an open source licence, and the owner of the site does reserve all the rights to the entirely human written code. Any replica must not use decomp.dev’s code in any form, which I think is absolutely fair enough. And also a bit of a policy question that I thought was quite interesting. Why not just forbid AI-assisted projects? I mean, of course, continue the site, continue the community, but just make it against the rules for people to submit AI-assisted projects.

Well, to quote Encounter: “I have long held the opinion that AI is not the issue by itself, and we now know it can help tremendously when used correctly. Slop comes in many forms, is hard to define, and even harder to moderate. As a sole hobbyist, I don’t have the energy or desire to define what makes a good decompilation and enforce that consistency across the hundreds of projects on the site. As this era of decompilation comes to a close, I want to thank everyone who’s been involved and contributed to our projects, communities and tools. The people and passion behind these projects have always been what’s made them fun and rewarding.” And yeah, you can read the rest of the statement by Encounter about the rather sad demise of decomp.dev linked in the usual places.

And I just wanted to finish this story, and I appreciate this has been quite a long segment, with perhaps some good news, a bit of a feel-good human story within the same kind of category. So over on timeextension.com, Jack Yarwood is reporting that this project around Beetle Adventure Racing on the Nintendo 64 will be the first human-led recomp. “Vibe coders outpaced them, but this Beetle Adventure Racing fan isn’t giving up.” “Good software is going to last,” reads the byline here. And of course, it talks about, you know, all the stuff that I’ve just discussed, a bit of background information. As always, excellent coverage by Time Extension. And this is a bit more of an in-depth kind of look at the project.

And I wanted to draw attention to this and shine a bit of a spotlight on this. And I think you should go and give this a read yourself, because it is just a bit of a byline, but quite an important one. And essentially, this is a person who goes by the name of Synamax, who has been working on their own Beetle Adventure Racing decomp and recomp project, making some modifications and things to the game, as these projects do, has found themselves being overtaken by an AI-led project to try to achieve the same thing, but is basically defying that and not letting it get the better of them and forging ahead with their own 100% human decomp and recomp project. And I thought that that was a very bold and noble thing to do.

And I thought it was worth drawing your attention to. So, if you want to go and read about Synamax’s project to decompile Beetle Adventure Racing and the trials and tribulations around that, and perhaps also, of course, go and give Synamax some support and some encouragement and some kind words, then I think that would be very much appreciated. And it just goes to show that, you know, not all of these projects are being completely and utterly ruined by this new technology.

Sadly, that is not the case for decomp.dev, a once great community, all about decompiling games.

Ultima Underworld For Modern Systems

So, a bit of insight into my process here at Rees Rambles, because this next story is actually very closely related to the previous one. And I wasn’t quite sure. Should I talk about this as a bit of an aside, a bit of an example of what I was talking about in the previous story? Or is it a whole new story in and of itself?

Well, actually, it’s a bit of both. And there’s probably no right way to go about this. So, it’s my podcast. And I’m just going to make this the second story for this week, because this is quite big news in its own right for Ultima Underworld fans, because this is Underworld Exhumed, which is Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 as byte-matching source code and native ports for macOS, Windows, and Linux. So, this is going to serve as an example of all of those things that I was just talking about, because it’s Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (1992) and Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds (1993), dug out of their original DOS programs. For each game, there is source code that rebuilds the original program byte for byte.

It compiles with the original Borland tools to exactly the shipped UW.EXE and UW2.EXE with readable names, shared headers, and notes on what each file does in the game. There are native ports for macOS, Windows, and Linux built from the same source. It plays the game in a window with its music, speech, and effects, and is checked against recorded DOS sessions for every change. And there is a web build of the same port compiled to WebAssembly. So, if you want to go and play Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 in your web browser, you can now go and do that as a result of this project.

And that’s huge news in its own right. Of course, massive games, the Ultima games, the whole Ultima series, but of course, Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 being particularly noteworthy entries in that series. A series that I still haven’t played for myself, and it seems that people out there are making it easier and easier for me as time goes on, and yet still I resist. I would really love to check out these games. They are absolute classics, and I know that my good friend Dave from This Week in Retro is a particular fan and keeps pushing me to try them out.

But the link to my previous story, of course, you can just go and play these if you want and just leave it at that. But the link to my previous story is that these have come about as a result of a decompilation and recompilation project called UW2Decomp and UW1Decomp. And they are, of course, linked as part of the same project. Now, you do need to find your own game data.

So, this is based on the GOG release, of course, Good Old Games, GOG.com. So, you can go and buy the games. They usually cost a couple of quid from there. And then you can run these tools against the original executables, and they will turn them back into source code. Source code, as I talked about, that gold standard in my previous story, that recompiles back into the original, byte for byte. And that is all confirmed.

And this has gone one step further, this project, and actually built a whole framework to run the two games side by side and actually check, you know, provide the same inputs and check for the same outputs, check they run at exactly the same speed. Even all the original bugs and things kind of preserved, as well, as a result of how kind of thorough and accurate this project is.

So, we have instructions on how you can build this for yourself. You need to download the package, of course, from the releases in the GitHub repo here. You need to install the game from GOG, and then the release here will obviously look in the usual install locations for that and find it automatically. And it will build whichever versions you like. So, the macOS versions, the Windows versions, or the Linux version, which is built as an AppImage directly from the original DOS compiled binaries as a completely automated process.

The controls are the game’s own, so the mouse and the keys as per the game’s original manual. It’s all, of course, integrated with your operating system of choice. We’ve got save games, which are kept in the port’s home folder. We’ve got a Sound Blaster with FM music and digitised speech or effects. You can also, if you’ve got the MT-32 ROM images, you can build Roland MT-32 versions. Of course, that wonderful MIDI device from back in the DOS days I have talked about. I have got one around here somewhere.

And it’s just crazy just how thorough all of this is. All fully documented. And the tools themselves are released under the MIT licence as well. So, it’s all properly open sourced as well. So, you can actually go in, modify the tools if you like. To talk about that in a bit more detail, of course, one thing that I talked about previously and have harped on about is how this whole process of decompilation and recompilation can be used to actually enhance these old games. Add new features and things, usability improvements, quality of life improvements, or whatever you like, really.

And this project is certainly no exception. So, yeah, the ports, if you just port them straight, you know, without any other kind of modifications and things, as stated, they have been checked and are byte for byte as per the original games. But we have some modern niceties that can be added from UltimaHacks, UWPatch, and a few other sources, I believe. So, we can skip the intros.

We can, you know, we can wrap the menu. So, when you’re scrolling up and down for the menu and go to the bottom, it just wraps back to the top. Very simple things, but things that weren’t supported in the original game, including increasing the speed of panels and navigational elements. We’ve got subtitles that can be enabled and disabled.

We’ve got all sorts of things. We can change the way the perspective texture mapper works in the games. We can change the way the sprite scaling works. We can change how far you can look up and down. Enable mouse look, which, of course, wasn’t supported by the original games. Change the keyboard mappings. And, hey, whatever else you like. Of course, this is all open source, so you can add your own improvements and enhancements, if you like, to this.

This Underworld Exhumed project, it is crazy just how in-depth and comprehensive this is. And hopefully now you’re starting to realise why I didn’t want to just tack this on as a kind of an add-on to the first story. But there is quite a big caveat here. There is quite an important note that I do need to add to this. And that is when we actually start to dig into the repo itself for Exhume, which is the tool set that I have been talking about that has been used to create this project, these recompilations. So, this is a toolkit and Claude Code skills for byte-matching decompilation of old DOS games from the Ultima Underworld 2 decompilation.

So, the author of this, who goes by the name of abedegno on GitHub, I’m not quite sure what your real name is. I do apologise, but, yeah, has actually released this as a set of tools that you can then apply to other DOS games. Of course, this has been, you know, specifically built around Ultima Underworld 2 and has been used to create the Underworld Exhumed projects for 1 and 2. But you can actually take this Exhume project and run it against other DOS games of a similar vintage.

And, you know, I guess with varying degrees of success, it will actually decompile and recompile those and do the whole same byte-matching thing, running the game side by side, checking that everything is, of course, you know, perfect byte for byte. And I think the really noteworthy thing here is that this uses Claude, this uses one of these LLM AI agentic coding tools, or however you want to describe it, and makes this accessible to people with no decompilation and recompilation experience, or indeed, maybe even no programming experience at all. And it’s all packaged up as this tool that you can just run against your old DOS games, and maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t. I don’t know. I haven’t tried it. But this is a shining example of how these tools are being used and how they are kind of completely revolutionising this, you know, this industry.

And, you know, one of the things that, of course, has led to the closure of decomp.dev, as I have talked about in that previous story. So Exhume is a toolkit and a set of Claude Code skills for byte-matching decompilation, writing C and assembly source that the original compiler, assembler, and linker turn back into the same executable, byte for byte.

It began with old DOS programs and Borland’s 16-bit tools, and now also covers embedded firmware for ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers, and for TI and various other stuff. There are toolchain profiles, so you can build your own profile for various different types of executables. It is for preservation and for owners of old programs and devices, people who want a program’s source back in a form that provably is the program, as the starting point for study, fixes, ports, and changes to firmware they own. It was extracted from the decompilation of Ultima Underworld 2, its first case study, made in the repository UW2Decomp, blah-de-blah-de-blah.

Just talks about that project, which, of course, I have also just gone into in great detail. So we have the tools, we have a headless DOS runner for the original toolchain, we have the runtime, which is a porting harness that basically does the whole thing in place, ports the entire thing. Multiple profiles, of course, as mentioned, for various different platforms.

And, yeah, a whole set of Claude Code skills that you can plug into Claude to automate this entire process. Looks like it’s all Python and Node-based, but you can dig into that if you are interested in checking it out for yourself. But, yeah, I guess if that isn’t indicative of the current state of decompilation and recompilation. And, ultimately, we have this rather fantastic and completely faithful and authentic and byte-for-byte, you know, preserved version of Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 to show as a result of this project. And very accessible, easy to fire up on Windows, Linux, macOS, and even in a web browser. And now we have this toolchain that is kind of being built and expanded to allow that for other games as well.

I think that is completely and utterly mind-blowing. I mean, yeah, it’s a very, you know, I don’t want to sit here and sing its praises. And, you know, of course, this has completely and utterly decimated the hobby that is decompilation and recompilation. But it has made it very easily accessible to a whole load of people who couldn’t use it before.

And, ultimately, is going to bring us a lot of very high-quality ports of DOS games that we, you know, that before would have taken months or even years to put together. So, I’d be interested in people’s thoughts on this. It is quite the big discussion. But, yeah, I think we have dedicated pretty much the entirety of the first half of Rees Rambles this week to this topic.

And it’s about time I moved on to something else. But a topic that we absolutely cannot avoid talking about, for better or for worse.

Sinclair Preserved! Ferranti ULA Design Docs Released

Huge, huge, huge news this week from the vintage computing community. Absolutely massive. I don’t think that I am overstating things by describing this next story using those words. This is going to be absolutely revolutionary and really, really good news. I don’t think you would find anyone who would argue that this is anything other than a massive positive for the preservation of the history of these machines. Because this is all relating to a much-loved and very, very important British home computer brand from the 1980s. I’m talking about Sinclair, Sir Clive Sinclair and his range of machines, the ZX80, the ZX81, the Spectrum.

Of course, there were quite a few others as well over the years. But we’re talking about that specific 8-bit era of machines. And back in those days, if you’re not kind of familiar with the UK perspective on this, of course, computers were big. They were expensive. And your average home user, your average person on the street couldn’t even dream of even having a computer in their own home until Sinclair came along. Of course, there were other British manufacturers, and I don’t mean to belittle their efforts and their contribution either. But, yeah, the Spectrum was massive, and it gave rise to a whole generation of bedroom coders, the whole British games industry. And it’s an industry, not wanting to kind of blow our own trumpet too much, but it’s an industry which the UK still massively kind of punches well above its weight in even today.

Although that is something that is being rapidly dismantled. But we will stick to the positives with this, and this has all come about as well due to a friend of the channel as well, Happy Little Diodes. And I was so, so happy to see this myself. So, we’ll head over to Hackaday for the summary of this, but there is also a video that I would urge you to watch. I’m also going to make this one of my videos of the week, if not my video of the week.

“45 years later,” writes Jenny List on Hackaday, “the Sinclair ULA design documents surface.” “In the 8-bit home computer boom of the early 1980s, Sir Clive Sinclair’s machines were always among the cheapest on the market, often packing a surprising level of sophistication in their limited hardware. If there was one component that was key to their success, it was the Ferranti ULA, or Uncommitted Logic Array. A clever way to make an ASIC from a chip containing a library of logic parts ready-made.”

“The Sinclair ULAs have been reverse-engineered, but their full details have remained a mystery. Until now, it seems, because here’s Happy Little Diodes with a treasure trove of original Ferranti design documents, covering all the Sinclair parts. The documents were picked up on eBay and contain folders with printouts, engineering drawings, and handwritten design notes. They cover the full range of Sinclair products of the era, including the ZX81 and Spectrum, the ZX printer, the Microdrive, the Spectrum Interface 1, and even the curious little flat-screen TV.”

“Oddly, the IP is now held by the satellite broadcaster Sky as the holder of Amstrad’s portfolio, but fortunately Sky have recognised their historical importance and allowed their sharing with minimal changes. They’re all catalogued with download links in a Google spreadsheet, so dig in and see what you can find. Of particular interest are the ULAs that haven’t been reverse-engineered yet, and the subtle differences between different versions of the same ULA as the engineers tried to fix bugs. The video is below the break. If you’re curious about the ULA and Ferranti, there is a period film about it as well.”

Oh, there you go. That’s great. So, yeah, the story here is that the channel Happy Little Diodes has managed to pick up these original Ferranti design documents and various other bits and pieces from Sinclair from back in the day, all on eBay, all original, and has actually got permission from the current rights holders to actually publish all of this stuff for the use of the community. And that means super accurate emulation of these chips, of course, MiSTer cores and things. We can make replacement chips that are direct one-to-one recreations of the original, which, of course, helps to keep that original hardware going as well.

This is huge news. It is absolutely huge news, and such a great thing for, of course, the Sinclair and the Spectrum community. So, yeah, I was going to say, my hat is off to you. There is Happy Little Diodes wearing a hat. Oh, it’s a sponsor segment. Oh, I’m not familiar with that sponsor. Let’s skip past that. Don’t know who those guys are. Anyway, a bit of history here about Sinclair, about the ZX80, and then kind of going on to talk about stuff like the Spectrum and the technical details behind the various bits of hardware that are covered here. Some lovely coverage of the Spectrum itself, as you would expect from Happy Little Diodes. Such a great channel. Please do go and subscribe to Happy Little Diodes when you go and watch this video.

Also, leave me a nice comment as well, letting him know that I sent you this in service of the community. I mean, you know, he could have bought all of this stuff and just kept it in a personal collection, locked away. But to actually go out to the current rights holders and get all of this stuff published and put it out there for free for the usage of the community is just going to massively benefit everyone. I mean, this is brilliant. This is absolutely brilliant news.

If you’re curious about the Sky thing, of course, Sky are a broadcaster here in the UK. They’re a satellite TV broadcaster and they actually acquired Amstrad, all of the rights to Amstrad’s hardware quite a few years back now, because Amstrad were making the set-top boxes for Sky and Sky wanted to own the rights to the hardware within those. So they basically just bought Amstrad, of course, Alan Sugar’s company from back in the day. And if you know anything about your computing history, you will also know that Sinclair was acquired by Amstrad and actually saved and kind of bailed out by Amstrad back in the day when the business was coming up against some difficulties.

Bailed out Sir Clive himself, you know, made streamlined and kind of cost-reduced versions of some of the Sinclair machines of the time. Kept that brand going and, yeah, it’s such a weird chain of events, I guess. But I guess that’s always the case once you start digging into the history of these things. So, yeah, what actually made these machines possible to produce at such a low cost and what made them so sophisticated, considering their very low prices, as mentioned, were the Ferranti ULAs that were designed. Kind of the hearts, the beating hearts of these systems. And now we can recreate them or modify them, fix bugs in them, make, you know, modified custom forks of them and, you know, recreate them in software or in hardware or, you know, as an FPGA core or anything is possible. Now we have all of these original design documents and not just the computers as well.

As mentioned by Hackaday, we’ve also got the printers, the TVs and some other kind of period hardware as well. So this will all be linked down below, but I do urge you to go and watch the video. It is an excellent, very well-produced video. It’s 20 minutes long. It is absolutely fascinating. A really great in-depth look at the technical details about how some of this hardware came about and also an in-depth look at some of the documentation that Happy Little Diodes has actually managed to acquire here. So, again, my hat is off to you.

This is story of the week, video of the week. Do go and check this out. Great to see this video doing some big numbers as well. 48,000 views in literally two days, which is such a fantastic thing to see for such a great channel. 10,000 subscribers and growing. Do go and watch it. But the big takeaway here is that we now have all of the original design documentation for all of these custom chips in all of these Sinclair machines. And that’s going to open so many doors for the vintage hardware community, for the worlds of preservation and emulation. And that’s a wonderful thing.

The DOOM Shrine

And so I think it’s about time we took our weekly visit to the DOOM Shrine, my personal collection of releases, paraphernalia, collectibles and all sorts of other stuff relating to id Software’s absolutely revolutionary 1993 first-person shooter called DOOM. I have everything from the original shareware release that came with our first PC all the way back in 1994, all the way up to that DOOM: The Dark Ages fire pit that I picked up a couple of months ago. I still haven’t played DOOM: The Dark Ages, the latest instalment.

id Software, the studio behind DOOM, as we’ve heard in recent months, is a shadow of its former self, a victim of Microsoft’s ongoing restructuring, unfortunately. But DOOM still lives on in our hearts and our minds. And in the case of the DOOM Shrine, that is also very apt because, of course, it has been dismantled. It has been moved to the new studio, so I can’t show it to you today, but it will be rebuilt.

It will rise again from the ashes, although it is all just kind of shoved into a box at the moment. But anyway, getting to the point, I like to cover the latest happenings in the world of DOOM every week because there is a fantastic community around this game and particularly people who like porting it to all sorts of unusual systems. And we’ve seen quite the range of systems over the years, embedded microcontrollers, that kind of thing, printers and other kind of devices, and even a satellite, which I think probably takes the prize for being the most expensive way to play DOOM, because not many people own their own satellite. But now we have another expensive and more higher-end option to enjoy this very high-end game, I will say.

But perhaps a little bit more affordable than buying a bit of space hardware. Anyway, getting to the point, this is a story over on Tom’s Hardware about an $8,000 Hasselblad X2D 100-megapixel medium format camera. And you can now play DOOM on that camera if you, yeah, want to spend $8,000 on something to play DOOM on. I guess you could also take some photos with it, maybe. That sounds like a lot of hassle. Anyway, Hassel, Hasselblad, get it? A story here by Jowi Morales, Tom’s Hardware, as mentioned. “An independent camera researcher,” writes Morales here, “experimenting with the firmware for expensive camera brands like Hasselblad and Ricoh just built software that lets photographers play DOOM directly on the X2D. This feature is part of the Hasselblad-X-System-CIM-Firmware-Research-Feature-Extensions repository on GitHub” – catchy name – “which also experiments with capabilities that factory units don’t come with. The creator, Radium Wang” – gotta love Reddit usernames – “says that this only contains source code, offline tools, tests and sanitised research findings, and it seems that it’s not meant to level up the expensive camera.”

“This isn’t the first time that someone has installed DOOM on a camera. As we saw another GitHub programmer do the same on the other end of the price spectrum a couple of months ago. That project brought the game to an entry-level DSLR from 2010 with an 18 megapixel sensor. This makes that camera the polar opposite of the Hasselblad X2D series, which costs thousands of dollars and is designed for professional photographers with its 100 megapixel resolution. Both projects highlight just how powerful embedded systems have become to the point where even digital cameras can now run a complete game. When id Software launched the game in 1993, its minimum system requirements were an Intel 386 processor, 4MB of RAM, and a VGA graphics card.” Now, if you’ve ever played DOOM on a 386, you’ll probably know that you’re better off with a 486, perhaps a higher-end system.

And just deviating from the story a moment, just to give my own thoughts, of course, if you wanted to buy a high-end 486, like a DX4, you know, around that time to enjoy DOOM to its full potential, that would have cost you probably a couple of thousand pounds. But, yeah, this camera costs four times that much for a camera.

I mean, I’ve got my own collection of expensive videography hardware, so, you know, it’s not all that unbelievable to me. But it just kind of puts things into perspective that you could have bought a whole PC for a quarter of that price back in 1994. But there you go. Anyway, “‘Can it run DOOM’ has now become a meme and a running joke among tech enthusiasts,” continues the story, “with programmers taking up the challenge of porting the game to the weirdest of devices. Some of the weirder examples that we’ve seen recently include an electric cooking pot” – I remember that one – “an orbiting satellite from the European Space Agency, and even an Apple Lightning to HDMI dongle.”

“Playing DOOM on a tiny 3.6-inch touchscreen isn’t exactly fun” – speak for yourself – “especially as the medium format camera form factor does not lend well to gaming. However, gaming on cameras isn’t actually the point of this and other similar projects. Instead, it’s the achievement of making something run somewhere unexpected. Now, if you happen to have an extra Hasselblad lying around in your house and don’t mind experimenting on your expensive equipment, you can take part in the joke by downloading this repo and following Wang’s instructions to reproduce the research.”

Wonderful! Another platform on which we can enjoy the greatest game of all time, an $8,000 Hasselblad camera. And I have one other interesting DOOM port for this week, which is, I can’t even relate this to that. It’s an entirely different league, but really interesting story and some interesting reading. I know quite a lot of people listen to this podcast looking for some interesting articles to read over the weekend.

And this one certainly fits into that category. This is one over on The Register: “No shame in the Domain Name game: DNS is doomed, literally. Fancy a bit of fun? It’s always DNS.” Of course, that’s a bit of a reference to some of the big internet outages and things that we’ve had recently as a result of DNS, the domain name system. But this is an article by Corey Quinn, and it appears, having read this, that Corey Quinn is the actual person behind this project and has ported DOOM to the DNS system, believe it or not.

“What is DNS?” writes Corey. “That’s right. It’s a database. You can disagree with me, but you would be wrong. What can you put in a database? Strings? Ints? And you’ll learn the difference right quick if your AWS account ID has a leading zero. JSON, objects, coordinates. Some of the databases out there have some pretty esoteric types.” Postgre… I’ve never known how to say that. “PostgreSQL supports circle, polygon, macaddr8 and tsquery. Oracle will store a ROWID and your dignity. In a word, databases store data.” Anyway, I’m not going to read the entire article to you, but if you haven’t got the gist of it just yet, the DNS system that runs the internet and indeed smaller networks as well allows us to map user-friendly host names like theregister.com to IP addresses on which those servers actually reside.

You know, DNS runs the entire networking world. And what Corey Quinn has done here has ported DOOM to DNS, or at least used the DNS system as a way to store variables relating to DOOM and actually run the game and use it to query this. Now, of course, DNS, as you’ll know, is very, very slow to update when you want to make changes to it.

Just to quote a paragraph here: “So, can we play DOOM? Only if it’s turn-based. It won’t render on human timescales anyway. In my first attempt, I pressed right and then waited 577 seconds to find out what happened. And by using native transport, pipelining, packing registers densely, and optimising instruction blocks, I was able to drop that to 146 seconds before I hit a wall.”

And, yeah, loads of really in-depth technical information in here about DNS, about DOOM, and about this rather convoluted and marvellous technical endeavour. So, do go and give that a read. I thought it was a really interesting article. And, of course, it’s all about DOOM and DNS. And, you know, due to what I do in my day job and my hobbies and things, it’s kind of the perfect intersection of everything that I know and love. So, only two DOOM stories this week, two offerings for the Shrine, but hopefully you’ll find that they are both very worthy.

Definitely NOT Rees’s Pieces

And now for some stories that very much fit into the category of not Rees’s Pieces. Of course, we don’t use that name around here. Firstly, because I have, as I’ve talked about in the past, I’m not a fan of those particular snacks, my namesake. Unfortunately, they would make ideal gifts for me if I did enjoy them, but sadly not quite to my taste. Secondly, even more importantly, it is a trademark that belongs to somebody else, so I couldn’t use the term Reese’s Pieces in any kind of official capacity anyway.

But thirdly, and most importantly, it’s ridiculous. It’s stupid. I wouldn’t stoop to such a level, would I? Not here. This is a professional operation. Anyway, what it is, more importantly, is a collection of stories that have popped up on my radar in the past week or so that I wanted to bring to your attention because I do think they’re important and I do think they’re interesting. But I didn’t really want to sit and talk about each one for 10 minutes at a time. I don’t really have a huge amount to add on each of these. But yeah, if you do want to learn a little bit more about these stories and the background information behind them, you can, of course, check out the description below on YouTube or the show notes on your podcast platform.

So, the first story that I have for you is all about these handheld gaming devices, these Anbernics. I mean, Anbernic is the one that is called out specifically here. And in the interest of full disclosure, I have been sent one of these in the past and actually reviewed it on my channel. And yes, it did come with an SD card loaded up with all sorts of different ROMs for different platforms, including some very well-known names like, you know, Nintendo stuff and Sega stuff. But yeah, the US government has been told to flag retro handhelds loaded with pirated games as a notorious market, reports Video Games Chronicle here. VGC, of course, a big and well-established and well-respected name in video games journalism.

And essentially, these notorious markets, I didn’t know about these, but apparently it’s a US government thing for knockoffs and counterfeits and things. And it specifically names certain manufacturers and distributors and retailers of these things. And Anbernic has been added to this list. Yeah, you can pick up these handhelds with SD cards loaded up with pirated games. Of course, you can actually buy these games in a lot of cases on various platforms.

The old PlayStation 1 games, the old Nintendo games, of course, on Nintendo’s platforms. And as these devices get more sophisticated and support, you know, devices reaching into kind of the late 90s and whatnot, we’re getting much more recent offerings available on here and things that the likes of Sega and Nintendo and Sony and all the rest of them don’t really like people giving away for free when they could be making some money out of it.

I’ve often wondered, you know, when you buy these things from Amazon or eBay or whatever, and they come with these cards loaded with games, I mean, how on earth do the sellers get away with it? It’s quite blatantly piracy. You know, I’m not preaching here. Of course, I do have my own collections of various things installed on my MiSTer and various other systems. But to actually sell those and to profit from them, I don’t know. And this is something that is being flagged by the U.S. government, and I do think that is noteworthy.

Next up, we have the 3dfx Voodoo story. Of course, the 3dfx Voodoo card, the OG, if you like, of PC 3D gaming, or certainly a very early, very noteworthy and very revolutionary example in that market, turns 30.

I remember these cards being released. I certainly remember GLQuake at the time. I had a friend whose uncle was a really big gamer. He was one of these guys in his 40s who still lives with his parents. And obviously, we thought he was the coolest person ever because he had a beast of a PC and a bit of a man cave.

And yeah, that was 30 years ago. Really good in-depth story here on club386.com. I wanted to make this a main story, but I don’t really have much to talk about on this side of things. You know, we had a Voodoo 3 in one of our PCs back in the day. I remember being quite impressed at watching, you know, Unreal and that fly-through demo with the castle and stuff at the beginning and, you know, some of the other kind of 3D games at the time. But this article tells it a lot better than I ever could. And so I highly urge you to go and give this a read.

club386.com: “The 3dfx Voodoo story: as the legendary graphics card tech turns 30, we talk to co-founder Ross Smith. It’s now three decades since the first 3dfx Voodoo graphics card was released and co-founder Ross Smith talks us through the story from the origin of the Voodoo name to a CEO threatening to cut off his hands if he brought up 3D graphics again.” The 90s, such an exciting time to be into PC gaming. And, you know, I was a teenager, a young teenager. And thankfully, you know, my dad was quite encouraging and quite supportive.

And, you know, and actually we got to experience some of that stuff on our home PC. And that’s something that I’m very grateful for and something that’s kind of shaped my opinions and my interests well into adulthood. But yeah, the 3dfx Voodoo card is where it all started. Absolutely love it. Great article.

Next up, the Silicon Underground. I featured one of David Farquhar’s stories previously.

And here’s another one for you. He is churning them out at the moment, but that is no, absolutely no reflection on their quality at all. He puts a huge amount of work and research into these and they are always a great read. So this is the story of when Apple Records sued Apple Computer. If you weren’t around at the time and don’t remember this, yeah, it’s really interesting. Of course, it ties into iTunes and stuff as well. And Apple kind of starting to sell music.

And Apple Records, of course, famous for being the Beatles record label, not taking kindly to that. But the history of that story goes back quite a bit further than that. And it is an interesting tale. If you’re interested in computers, if you’re interested in music and the history of both and how they intersect, it’s a great article.

Another great article from David Farquhar. So yeah, Silicon Underground, again, linked below.

Next up, we have Vertical Slice. Now, this is related to some of the restructuring and stuff that’s been going on in the industry. This isn’t an in-depth article that you can go and give a read, although it does provide quite a bit of interesting backstory to this. But essentially, the story here is that Ubisoft employees have decided to go on strike.

And there’s all sorts of interesting reasons for this, very valid reasons. And of course, as someone who works in the software industry and has a lot of connections in the game development industry as well, I can only support these people fighting to keep their jobs and, of course, their, you know, quality of their jobs and their pay and stuff as, well, we’ve talked about all the issues around this.

But yeah, there’s also, this has kind of been triggered by a five-day return to office mandate from Ubisoft, of course, as part of all of this restructuring. Lots of people getting very comfortable working from home. I’m sure many of you out there have your own thoughts on that. I’ve been self-employed for a very long time and I’ve done a fair amount of work from home.

But I know it’s not something that works for everyone. But it’s also related, of course, to the layoffs and to restructuring AI tools, all of that stuff. And Ubisoft employees are currently in the process of voting to go on strike in response to that. And of course, if that does go ahead, it’s going to be absolutely massive.

So lots of background information about that here. And of course, if and when that does come about, I’ll be talking about that here on Rees Rambles.

And next up, for something completely and utterly different again, if you are a ScummVM fan. Now, ScummVM, if you are not familiar with it, is a platform that originally started to allow us to enjoy the old Maniac Mansion games and the kind of spin-offs from those, stuff like your old Monkey Island games, all these point-and-click, you know, Day of the Tentacle, point-and-click adventure games on modern platforms.

And essentially, you can load it up with all of your original copies of the files from those games and it will actually run them through this interpreter that adds lots of nice quality of life stuff and support for modern platforms. It has since branched out well beyond stuff that used, I mean, SCUMM, ScummVM. SCUMM stands for the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, which is where it started.

But ScummVM has now branched out way beyond that, getting back to the point. And the latest offering is Dungeon Master, which I thought was very noteworthy because, of course, this was a huge game on the Atari ST. Started off on the Atari ST, bit of a system seller, a bit of a, you know, a killer app on that machine.

Later on, moved to the Amiga and the PC. The interesting thing about this is that it supports the Amiga version and the PC version, but it doesn’t appear to support the Atari ST version, the original one. So, I guess that’s an interesting choice. Of course, I think the ST version being the original does mean that the Amiga and the DOS versions were a bit enhanced and a bit improved, but it’s the OG. And all the way back in 1987, when the ST was but two years old and still kind of finding its foothold in the computer market, it was a very big title and quite a big turning point for that machine.

And it’s a great game in its own right. A very early example of one of these 3D dungeon crawler type games well worth checking out. And you can now do that very easily, thanks to ScummVM.

And speaking of the Atari ST, this also came up on my radar. This is something that popped up on Bluesky, thanks to Atari Scene News.

Did you know that the vehicle physics in Grand Theft Auto, GTA, were first developed in 1996 on an Atari ST computer? They were programmed in GFA BASIC and were later converted to C for the finished game. And this links to patkerr.co.uk, which is, of course, Pat Kerr’s official website. A developer who was involved in Grand Theft Auto all the way back in 1997.

It was eventually released on the PlayStation, the PC and, of course, plenty of other platforms as well over the years. The first top-down iteration of that franchise. And I’ll let Pat tell the story in his own words. So: “One weekend in late August 1996, I wrote a 2D physics simulation, which later became the basis of the vehicle system in the eventually popular game Grand Theft Auto, aka GTA. It began as a little wireframe demo written in GFA BASIC on my Atari ST home computer and was later ported to C for use in the actual game. I have recreated it here in JavaScript for its 30th anniversary in a slightly prettier remastered form for anyone who is interested in seeing or playing it.” So, you can actually play with this in your browser and it goes on to explain that, you know, well, everything in great detail about, you know, vehicle geometry, rigid body physics and all sorts of stuff that’s gone completely and utterly over my head because I’m not a physics guy. But yeah, it was quite a comprehensive physics simulation considering it was this 2D top-down.

Of course, such great driving controls in the original GTA game and something that has kind of carried forward into the rest of the franchise as well. Such a great feel to the driving in that game. And that is something that started in the original thanks to these physics, which were honed on the Atari ST. And as a big Atari ST fan, I thought, of course, that that was very noteworthy indeed. We have the Atari ST to thank for the excellent vehicle physics in the GTA series and you can go and play with it yourself and, of course, read all about how it works and the story behind how it came to be. Links to that story and everything else in the usual places.

Videos Of The Week

And that, my dearest ramblers, of course, brings us around rather neatly to our regular videos of the week feature, wherein I feature a video or indeed multiple videos that I’ve seen here on the old YouTubes in the past week that have entertained, educated, enlightened or otherwise just improved my life in some small way. Or indeed, videos that have been sent to me that I have on my watch later list, but haven’t quite gotten around to watching yet. But the one thing that they do all have in common is that I thought they would be interesting or thought provoking and wanted to share them with you. So that’s what I’m doing right now and every week here on Rees Rambles.

Anyway, with that slightly butchered intro behind us, let’s jump straight into the six videos that I have for you this week. And the first one is from a smaller channel, 775 subscribers, called Adam Sipione. And, of course, I do like to give a bit of a shout out and shine a bit of a spotlight on these smaller channels. I’ve been there. I know what it’s like trying to grow a YouTube channel. So when people are putting out excellent work like this, I think it is very much worth celebrating.

So, yeah, what is it? It’s a 13-minute look at Shenmue. “Why Is Shenmue?” is the name of the video. And it’s, of course, about Sega’s third-person open-world game on the Dreamcast back in the day. Now, if you experienced this game within the context of the time and what was kind of technically possible at the time, you would have been blown away because it was such a revolutionary title. We haven’t really seen anything like this before on any other platform.

Few people sharing examples, obviously, as is always the way. But, yeah, to have packaged it up in such a way and to have built kind of such a complete and believable and immersive world was a really big achievement at the time. And this is a really great video essay, kind of taking a look at the game, some of the philosophy behind it, some of the design decisions behind it, and just kind of the story of the game. And, hey, if you’ve played it and are familiar with it, then you will no doubt find this very, very interesting. And if you haven’t, it’s a great introduction to it. So highly recommended to everyone. And if you do enjoy it, please do also give the channel a subscribe as well because Adam here is putting out some excellent work.

Next up, I have, what is my second video of the week? Oh, of course, an update on the Space Cadet pinball machine. We’ve been following along with CNCDan’s project here and, of course, seen his channel grow as well along the way, which, of course, is always great to see. So hard to get your name out there. But, yeah, this is a project that has covered kind of all aspects of making, you know, hardware and 3D printing and software and design. And it’s just such a great all-round project. It is, of course, updated in these regular update videos.

And I think Dan is getting to the point now where it is all kind of starting to come together and starting to look like a very nice and coherent and complete final project, which, of course, is very rewarding for us who have been watching along with this every week. “My Space Cadet Pinball Machine Is Starting to Look Real,” as Dan describes it in the title. And I think that is very apt.

11 minutes long this video. So, you know, it’s a nice little compact and concise watch, perhaps on your tea break or whatever when you’re supposed to be working. I have enjoyed this project very much. I love people building stuff, designing stuff from scratch. And, of course, Windows XP itself, 25 years old with that Space Cadet pinball game bundled as the inspiration. So appeals to the retro gaming, retro computing aspect as well. I know, describing Windows XP as retro. My goodness.

Anyway, let’s not dwell on that. All we need to know is that it’s a great project and it is still ongoing and still looking fantastic. So, as mentioned, 10 minutes, 58 seconds long, the latest update. If you have missed out on all of those, please do go back to the beginning and check it out from the very start because it’s very impressive.

Next up, I have a video all about a brand new hardware project. I think I mentioned this a while ago, but I didn’t realise just quite how far this had come along. And this is going to be a real, you know, a real game changer for people who are into their historic laptops, their vintage laptops, because this is the PicoPCMCIA.

So it’s a PCMCIA card with a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller on it. It has a built-in ESP32 Wi-Fi radio. It has a micro SD slot. It has, I believe that’s a USB-C slot. So lots of expansion options. Of course, you are quite limited by the PCMCIA’s physical size. And this allows us to emulate things like storage devices, gives us access to USB devices, input devices, you know, mice and that kind of thing.

And, of course, also Wi-Fi, thanks to that Wi-Fi radio. We’ve seen similar projects in the past targeting ISA cards and PCI cards. And, of course, I have covered those on the channel in the past. This is the latest iteration of that, the PicoPCMCIA. So if you want a development update and you want to see where that project is, this video by Kevin Moonlight does cover that in quite a bit of detail, which is great. Loads of technical detail in this video. And these old laptops, you know, I have these old ThinkPads and I’ve had Toshiba Librettos and stuff in the past as well. Always hard to add expansion to them. Very limited expansion options. Very limited storage options.

And to be able to get these things online on a wireless network and emulate, you know, USB storage devices and ATA storage devices and all the rest of it, all in one device. Using the Pico is very, very useful indeed. And much like the PicoMEM and, my goodness, I’m forgetting my devices. PicoIDE, that was the latest one that I reviewed. And all of these other, you know, excellent projects. I think this one is going to be quite big news. Still in development.

And, yeah, I really need to pick one up and check it out on one of my old ThinkPads, I think. That’s 15 minutes long. And as mentioned, the channel is Kevin Moonlight. Anyway, moving on to the next one. This is a real, yeah, this is such a passion project. And, you know, I love stuff like this. I love music related stuff and the intersection between computers and gaming and music as well. All big passions of mine.

And this is also the original PlayStation as well, which is, of course, something I’ve been getting into and kind of covering quite a lot quite recently. It is SoundFontGuy. And he has made an album using the original PlayStation. So this is made on a real PlayStation. And as you might expect, it has a very kind of PlayStation-y feel to it.

Very nostalgic for lovers of that platform. And this video just covers how that project came about and the technical details of how it was all put together. Sampling sounds from the PlayStation and, you know, using those to kind of put together these music tracks. Also, no AI involved in the making of this. The author does go to great lengths to point that out. It is very much a human, handmade, handcrafted project. And also, you are forbidden for using this to train AI as well. There’s something else that SoundFontGuy also wanted to make quite a big deal about. And quite rightly so, I think. Well within his rights to do that. But yeah, just a really lovely little nine minute long video over on SoundFontGuy’s channel.

Also shared on Elezeid Studio. There you go. There’s me mispronouncing things again. And a really well-made video as well. Just covering this really interesting project. So, yeah, that’s “I Made REAL PlayStation Music. Here’s How.” from SoundFontGuy. Now, speaking of guys, we have the 8-Bit Guy. Now, I wanted to just mention this because everyone, everyone has been talking about this this week.

He appears to be working on, again, it’s an AI project. This is the complete opposite of the project I just talked about. And it’s led to quite a lot of discussion. Now, I don’t know if I really, I mean, I haven’t watched it. I don’t know if I really should share my thoughts and my opinions on this on other YouTubers here. I’ve certainly fallen into that trap before. But the reaction to this is what’s interesting. Because, of course, the 8-Bit Guy has been doing this for a very long time. He’s one of the OG vintage computing YouTubers that started off fixing old machines and stuff. Of course, he’s had his fair share of controversy over the years.

Has recently been building his own studio, of course, all solar-powered, which, you know, has kind of captured a lot of people’s interest. And also involved in the opening of a real-life arcade as well. Not to mention his games, his software projects, Planet X3 and Petscii Robots and a few others as well. But this is a GenAI film that stars a character who is very reminiscent of him.

And, yeah, I only really have the discussion to go on. Now, I wanted to, usually my videos of the week are things that I recommend that I want to point people towards. But I guess I just wanted to talk about the conversation around this. Some of the comments, as you might expect from a GenAI project, the comments aren’t good. “I would pay money to never see that trailer ever again.” Yeah. “I guess that’s 8-Bit Guy’s version of a midlife crisis.” “I feel like I need a shower now.” “I lost a bunch of neurons.” “Anakin, you’re breaking my heart.” “There aren’t enough words to describe how bad an idea this AI movie is.” “This feels like a prank.”

I just wanted to acknowledge some of the discussion around this. It is what it is. You know, a big name in our particular space. Anyway, finally, moving on to something that I have already talked about in this week’s ramble. I just wanted to bring your attention back around to, again, because this has been such huge news and there’s such a great video that goes along with this. Happy Little Diodes and the acquisition of all of that historic Ferranti material regarding the design of their ULAs that, of course, powered some of the most important and iconic Sinclair machines of the 1980s. So, yeah, 20-minute video all about these machines, how they work, the history behind how they were designed, a bit of a look into some of this documentation and the story of how Happy Little Diodes came to acquire it and share it with the world and get the rights to kind of put it out there.

Again, my hat is off to you. This is, if I were to pick a video of the week, this would most certainly be it. So there we go. Six videos of the week for you there. “Why Is Shenmue?” from Adam Sipione. And that’s 13 minutes long. We have the latest update in CNCDan’s Space Cadet Pinball, 10 minutes, 58 seconds long.

We have an update on the PicoPCMCIA, a very interesting looking device for fans of old laptops from Kevin Moonlight. We have the PlayStation album, “I Made REAL PlayStation Music. Here’s How.”, from SoundFontGuy. That’s nine minutes and nine seconds. The 8-Bit Guy’s AI movie. And also, of course, that rather wonderful story about the Ferranti ULA designs, how they were acquired and put out there by Happy Little Diodes to improve the lives of the Sinclair community.

A Tribute To Richard “Levelord” Gray

And so, sadly, as is, of course, always the case here on Rees Rambles every single week, our time together must now draw to a close. So thank you to all of you for joining me, of course, here on Rees Rambles, my weekly podcast, all about the latest comings and goings, movings and shakings and all the rest of it from the worlds of vintage and retro computing, gaming and technology.

These go out every week on a Friday night at two minutes to midnight UK time, both on my second YouTube channel, youtube.com/reesrambles, and also on the podcast platforms, starting with Spotify and wafting their way out across the internet from there. If you’ve heard or seen anything of interest in this week’s ramble, of course, as always, you can find the links in the description on YouTube and also in the show notes of your podcast app. And a large part of Rees Rambles is, of course, my Discord community who submit various stories every week.

Some or all or none of their submissions make it through here to Rees Rambles. I think it’s fair to say that it’s usually mostly my Discord community bringing this stuff to my attention. And I just wanted to give a shout out, of course, to some names, people who’ve either submitted stuff or just been involved in the ongoing conversation.

Those names including, but not limited to: Mike C, Analogue Sheep, Steve Cooper from Steve’sTechShed, “All right. This is a user name.”, who is a new member – hello to you – gravitone, Naoki Saito, Crafton, Mx Autumn (PhotoGabble), Timberwolf, Wintermute of CoF. I keep meaning to ask Wintermute of CoF: are you a member of Cradle of Filth? Like, on my Discord? Is that something I’ve just completely and utterly passed by? I don’t know.

OtherRetroMatt, TechNick, Garoninja, SooS, and our good friend mnemo as well. So if you want to join us and come and discuss varying topics from gardening to solar power to boating to whatever projects we might be working on on any given week, including my Fire Hazard that I mentioned at the beginning of this week’s ramble, please do check out the link in the description and do, you know, make yourself known. You’ll be made to feel very welcome.

So one final piece of business this week. And sadly, as is becoming increasingly the case every week, we do have to pay tribute to and say goodbye to a really big name in the game development world. And this is being reported over on pcgamer.com, as well as, of course, various other outlets: “Legendary level designer Richard ‘Levelord’ Gray has died. Gray got his start with Duke Nukem 3D before moving to co-found Ritual Entertainment.”

“Richard Gray, better known to gamers of a certain age as Levelord, has died. Gray’s death was reported on social media by Apogee Entertainment, who paid tribute to his legendary work on Duke Nukem 3D and the lasting legacy he left behind.” And we have that post here. So: “We are deeply saddened by the passing of Richard ‘Levelord’ Gray. From his legendary work on Duke Nukem 3D to the countless players and developers he inspired, Richard leaves behind a lasting legacy. Rest in peace, Levelord.”

And yeah, he was 68 years old. I don’t believe a cause of death has been given. PC Gamer does go on. I should mention that this story was written by Andy Chalk, by the way, at PC Gamer. Credit where it is due. Andy does go on to talk about some of Levelord’s contributions. So Gray worked as a level and map designer on numerous shooters in the late 1990s and early 2000s, beginning with Duke Nukem 3D in 1996.

Shortly after that game launched, he left 3D Realms and co-founded Hypnotic Interactive, later renamed to Ritual Entertainment, where he worked on games including Quake: Scourge of Armagon, SiN, Star Trek: Elite Force II, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, 25 to Life and others. He also earned a very specific fame for his “You’re not supposed to be here” Easter egg in Duke Nukem 3D.

And I will say that as a kid, I say as a kid, how old would I have been in 1996? I would have been 12. There you go. Playing through Duke Nukem 3D through the shareware episode, the last level of that shareware episode is called The Abyss. And it’s this huge open chasm level. It’s absolutely fantastic. I remember it very, very well. But of course, I also cheated quite a lot and got into areas that I wasn’t supposed to be in. And as per many other people, I actually discovered this message firsthand: “You’re not supposed to be here.” Signed by the Levelord. Of course, no idea who he was at the time. And of course, that he would go on to, you know, design so many iconic levels for so many big games as he did. That’s just by the by. That’s just kind of my personal experience. And I’m sure it’s an experience shared by many of you.

Gray came to the game business at a relatively, for the industry, advanced age. In a 2016 interview with Duke64Nukem.com, he said he was 35 when he made his first DOOM level, calling himself a late bloomer with games. While Apogee founder Scott Miller said Gray was in his 40s when the studio hired him out of the DOOM mod scene to work on Duke Nukem 3D.

“I hired him to work on Duke 3D in 1994 after seeing some of his really impressive DOOM levels. He was pretty active in the mod scene,” Miller shared with PC Gamer. “He then moved to Dallas and worked from our offices. He got along well with everyone and impressed everyone with his dedication and talent. Richard loved to push the engine to its limits and he came up with a lot of fun level design tricks using portals, for example, that our other level designers learned from.”

And of course, some more, you know, messages here from various people who have worked alongside Richard over the years, including John Romero himself. Yeah, he described him as full of life, a gentle soul and an excellent level designer. He was called Levelord for a reason. So, yeah, Richard “Levelord” Gray has sadly left us this week, aged 68, best known for his work in the DOOM modding scene, his levels for Duke Nukem 3D, really pushing the limits of what was possible with the Build engine, and onwards to work on those Quake expansion packs and SiN. And, yeah, quite the list of accolades.

So, as always, you know, thoughts with his friends and family and everyone who knew him. But that’s all I have for this week’s ramble. So thank you once again for joining me and I’ll see you in the same time and place again next week. Bye.