Welcome to VGM CON. This annual celebration combines music performance with tournaments, indie games, panels, workshops, energy drinks, and a whole lot of fun.
VGM CON is organized by Gamer’s Rhapsody: a 501C3 non profit organization.
Our purpose is to create a community of engaged creators and fans around video games through unique experiences you can’t find at home.
All of the members of our planning committee are volunteers and are members of the video game development or game music community.
We are a welcoming community of people from all walks of life and enforce an environment where attendees can be themselves as long as it isn’t at the expense of someone else.
Gamer’s Rhapsody is the presenting organization that hosts VGM CON. This organization is volunteer run by the planning committee.
VGM CON challenges attendees to use their passion of video games to develop skills. We offer orchestra clinic, music jam space, art challenges, and panels inspire others to create, and find new people to create with.
🗓️ Start: February 21, 2026 3:00 pm
📍 Location: 6700 Aloma Ave, Winter Park, FL 32792, 6700 Aloma Ave, Winter Park, FL 32792
All Heroes join us at Conduit in Winter Park, Florida for Legendary: Celebrating 40 Years of Zelda.
ON THE ACTUAL ANNIVERSARY
This is a good question I get asked a lot. If coffee works this way on you then you're probably curious why. We thought it deserved a special answer...If you...
Rats are brilliant animal model for biological studies relating to humans due to significant similarities to us. I will say though seeing a result in a single study on rats doesn't mean "definitive this is how it works in humans" and think the video should have concluded in a less "and that's the answer" way.
It's still an unpleasant experience today carried via FAT32 or exFAT and the limitations that come with those filesystems.
Obviously much better than the old days you're describing but I wanted to move some files from a Mac to an NTFS drive and it was incredibly frustrating because macOS won't write to NTFS
I'm a vim novice. I basically know just enough to save files or quit, paste with formatting, and "insert" changes. I think I used to know how to find within a file, and I'm sure I could learn again in an instant, but I haven't had to do that in a long time for my noobish tasks. I know it is way more capable than that, but I haven't had to learn more features yet since I use it at a 'nano' level.
I agree it only takes 3 minutes to learn these things, but personally it took me a bit longer to make them muscle memory.
I get it if someone were to be annoyed that things they knew how to do in another program they had to re-learn in vim, but this kind of thing it seems like you would just accept that you're going to be frustrated and then put in the work to learn it so you can work more easily with your coworkers or whatever. Like you said, vim has serious advantages, and it seems a little short sighted to not be willing to learn from people that want to train you up in a tool to be more effective.
For a time, many people's first encounter with vi was when it auto-opened a temporary editor to ask them to submit a commit message for the git command they just ran.
This experience skips the vi "welcome" screen, because a file is open.
As a bonus challenge, git did not inform the user what editor is in use, and the user had no particular reason to even expect an editor to appear, based on what they were just doing.
None of this was the fault of vi, really. But it was a terrible introduction.
It got better when various operating systems changed their default command line editor to nano, and git added some helpful adjustments - "if certain settings are not configured, assume a new user and show verbose welcome messages".
What do you mean "build our dev environments around vim"? If you mean they write dev tooling in vimscript and explicitly require everyone to use it, I actually agree with you. I don't believe employers should really ever force any particular editor or IDE if the work is getting done. I would be equally annoyed by a workplace forcing me to use vscode instead of vim. It would slow me down way too much.
If you are just complaining that they build dev tooling as a CLI, hard disagree. That is absolutely what dev tooling should use because it's actually universal and can be used regardless of your editor choice.
At my workplace, our dev tooling is done via CLI and our developers use vim, emacs, and vscode. Because it's all CLI, it's easy for individual developers to add their own scripts to automate parts of their workflow as they see fit (and if such automations are deemed useful by the group at large, it will get merged into our shared devtools repo). We even have some editor-specific stuff in there people have written that they find useful, but it's entirely optional.
Yes, firmware running on bare metal requires good resource management. My current development board processor contains 512KB SRAM. That's equivalent to half of the size of an average PDF.
I think it's intended for checking the same bit in multiple bytes. You load the mask instead of the data.
So much 6502 ASM involves turning your brain inside-out... despite being simple, clever, and friendly. Like how you can't do a strided array sensibly because there's no address register(s). There is no "next byte." Naively, you want separate varied data at the same index is separate arrays. Buuut because each read address is absolute, you can do *(&array+1)[n], for free.
What I really miss on NES versus Game Boy is SWAP.
For the packet size and fils format issues, it seems like this language feature would be less reliable than bit shifting or masking, given that different implementations may store the bits in a different order or not compactly
x86 has bit manipulation instructions for any bit. If you have a book stored in bit 5 it doesn't need to do anything masking, it can just directly check the state of bit 5. If you do masking in a low-level programming language to access individual bits then the compiler optimization will almost always change them to the corresponding bit manipulation instructions.
So there's not even a performance impact if you're cycle limited. If you have to operate on a large number of bools then packing 8 of them in bytes can sometimes actually improve performance, as then you can more efficiently use the cache. Though unless you're working with thousands of bools in a fast running loop you're likely not going to really notice the difference.
But most bool implementations still end up wasting 7 out of 8 bits (or sometimes even 15 out of 16 or 31 out of 32 to align to the word size of the device) simply because that generally produces the most readable code. Programming languages are not only designed for computers, but also for humans to work on and maintain, and waisting bits in a
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x86 has bit manipulation instructions for any bit. If you have a book stored in bit 5 it doesn't need to do anything masking, it can just directly check the state of bit 5. If you do masking in a low-level programming language to access individual bits then the compiler optimization will almost always change them to the corresponding bit manipulation instructions.
So there's not even a performance impact if you're cycle limited. If you have to operate on a large number of bools then packing 8 of them in bytes can sometimes actually improve performance, as then you can more efficiently use the cache. Though unless you're working with thousands of bools in a fast running loop you're likely not going to really notice the difference.
But most bool implementations still end up wasting 7 out of 8 bits (or sometimes even 15 out of 16 or 31 out of 32 to align to the word size of the device) simply because that generally produces the most readable code. Programming languages are not only designed for computers, but also for humans to work on and maintain, and waisting bits in a bool happens to be more optimal for keeping code readable and maintainable.
That bools are stored in 8 bits rather than 1 is a compiler detail. I don't really see how this improves readability, unless you mean that of the compiled binary.
I've used it a fair amount for memory mapped IO where the hardware defined bitfields. It is also useful when you have a data format with bitfields. I'd say it is also useful when your data does not respect byte boundaries, but the only time I've run into that involved the bit order being "backwards", which means that I still had to bittwidle things back together.
From a performance perspective, a cache line is only 64 bytes. Space in registers, low level memory caches, and memory throughout are all limited as well.
Ya'know, it shouldn't be too hard to setup the ╔ and ╚ characters to function as or be substituted for quotes or brackets, depending on the language, then handle the rest as ligatures. Straight display substitution could allow for clean code and portable touch-typing, while still providing this sort of "visual training wheels" for those who want it in their own editor/ide
Correct, noticed the same thing. Should have been a bang in front of each of the terms, your modulus of any of those will return a 0 when hit, which will convert to false and fail each of those conditions.
This solution will do the opposite of what was intended unless the if conditions are inverted. Then it works flawlessly and the %15 is indeed a clever solution.
Celebrating 20 Years of ThaSauce and What the Future Holds
Hi. Hello. Is this thing on? It’s been a while since I last posted, but I’m proud to celebrate 20 years of ThaSauce today. It’s been a long, strange, and unforgettable journey, to be sure. Although the oldest post currently hosted on ThaSauce is a post by Rayza discussing the launch of VGDJ: The [at the time] Official OCR Podcast, which was posted on May 28th, the actual first post ever was posted on May 5th, 2005, announcing Harmony’s replacement of Digital_Coma as a judge on OCR:
The first ever posted on ThaSauce
The Early Years
Before ThaSauce
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Celebrating 20 Years of ThaSauce and What the Future Holds
Hi. Hello. Is this thing on? It’s been a while since I last posted, but I’m proud to celebrate 20 years of ThaSauce today. It’s been a long, strange, and unforgettable journey, to be sure. Although the oldest post currently hosted on ThaSauce is a post by Rayza discussing the launch of VGDJ: The [at the time] Official OCR Podcast, which was posted on May 28th, the actual first post ever was posted on May 5th, 2005, announcing Harmony’s replacement of Digital_Coma as a judge on OCR:
The first ever posted on ThaSauce
The Early Years
Before ThaSauce was created, Larry “Liontamer” Oji hosted a college radio show called VG Frequency. He regularly played community arrangements on the show, interviewed guests, and discussed community events and news. While the show was loved throughout the community, unfortunately, college doesn’t last forever, and eventually, VG Frequency ended. That’s when I started to muse on what I could do to fill the hole VGF had left behind.
The site started out hosted on my high school computer in a folder named “IDEAR.” I had zero programming or basic web design experience, but I was determined to make it work. Luckily, fusion2004 came with a slew of solutions and programming experience. Not long after, ThaSauce launched as a PHP-Nuke website hosted on a subdomain owned by community member SleazyC. The name ThaSauce is a play on a nickname given to me by my friends, “The Rama Sauce,” which was a play on my internet handle, Ramaniscence. It would be another 2 months before ThaSauce.net became an officially registered domain.
A screenshot of ThaSauce in early development
ThaSauce’s community grew quickly, and in the following years and months, we launched new sites, including ReMix:ThaSauce and Compo:ThaSauce (now known as Compoverse). Still, for many years, ThaSauce.net remained the focus of the growing network. We hired an editor, added community spotlights, and covered events like MAGFest. Some of my proudest moments were:
Taking my entire desktop computer and CRT monitor to do our first ThaSauce Panel at MAGFest 5.
I still don’t know how to sit in chairs correctly. Photo courtesy Wesley Cho.
Becoming a regular contributor throughout the life of VJDJ.
Unfortunately, as it often does, life happened. Many of ThaSauce’s staff members gained full-time employment, in no small part due to their experience working on the site, and as time went on, the time spent updating ThaSauce.net dwindled, and most of the community activity shifted toward the One Hour Compos hosted by starla. ThaSauce was also severely affected, as many independent online communities were, by the rise of social media platforms like Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter, as social algorithms began to monopolize users’ free time.
Still, the video game community has continued to grow. New artists release new music daily thanks to sites like YouTube and Bandcamp. Community events like MAGFest and VGMCon continue to grow year after year as well. Lately, I’ve found myself more engrossed in the community than I have been in a long time. I have also noticed that, even as the community grows, many smaller communities that make up the scene have popped up, leaving the community more fragmented than ever. As a result, it’s easy to miss updates from artists, events, or communities. That’s why I’m happy to announce, in the words of Strong Bad: “Let’s go back to a website.”
Let’s Go Back to a Website
Screw it. Starting today, we’re gettin’ back on the horse. ThaSauce.net is officially going to restart active community coverage. The explosive growth seen by social networks and Discord over the past decade has caused a disastrous monopolization of what used to be free information on the internet. Everything we do is now being monitored and analyzed to feed the algorithms and monetize our time. Gone are the days of independent blogs, community forums for public knowledge and discourse, and RSS feeds for easy, ad-free, chronological updates. I want to use my little slice of the internet to bring a little bit of that back while continuing to do what I love: amplifying the voices of all talented artists who contribute to our community.
So what should you expect? Truthfully, as much as I’d like to jump back into this full swing, I also recognize that there’s a lot of maintenance to be done around here, and I also have a full-time job. For those reasons, I’d like to start slow. First, I have worked to integrate ThaSauce’s WordPress with the ActivityPub protocol. This means you can now begin following ThaSauce from your favorite Fediverse platform, Mastodon, Friendica, or whatever, at the handle @newsright now. Next, I have started work on a new, custom ThaSauce design; One that is up to par for modern browsers and devices. It probably won’t be as aggressively red and black as the site has been historically, but it will still be very on brand. Finally, I’d like to make one community wrap-up per month at a minimum. I feel like that is easy enough with as fast as the community goes these days, and it will also give me plenty of time to follow and discover all of the new artists and communities.
After that, who knows? I’ve been throwing around the idea of having widgets that show community members actively streaming on Twitch, I’d like to do a lot more event coverage since I often find myself as VGM shows, both locally in Orlando, as well as around the country, I’d like to start work on bringing back some of our regular community show cases and interviews, and of course we’re going to keep holding One Hour Compos, every Thursday at 9 PM EST on Compoverse. Oh, and there’s also continued development of all the infrastructure that will eventually become the relaunch of many of our other sites. Only time will tell, but for now, I am very proud of the past 20 years and incredibly excited about the future of ThaSauce.
I work at a bank and it's mind boggling how often I encounter systems very similar to this. A signed PDF isn't good enough but send it via fax and suddenly it's secure 🙄
I worked at an MSP for years and had clients who would send it back and forth that way to each other. The most common were medical practices, but banking wasn't far behind.
Fax was considered secure because you could lock up the fax machine physically.
My favorite setup was a medical practice that dealt with stomach issues, including colon cancer, and their neighbor in the same building who was a pathology lab. They both had the PDF to fax and fax to PDF servers set up to send back and forth when someone could just walk 50 feet and hand over paperwork.
I plan to hold a relatively informal talk about declarative macros in Rust at $DAYJOB and the colleague who organizes that used an LLM to write the invitation flavor text.
I don't hate it for that. It does some text formatting with emojis and whatnot, which is decent enough. It does have information about declarative macros, so it can throw in some rough ideas what listeners can expect, like reduced boilerplate. What I certainly like less is that it sounds like the most bombastic salesperson, and of course doesn't know what my talk will actually be about, so it just promises everything.
Including some straight-up non-sense, like apparently I'll show folks how to use declarative macros to "improve performance". That genuinely had us wondering, if that's possible. I'm guessing, you could theoretically pre-compute a value at compile-time, but them being declarative macros, you'd have to do horrid constructs, like basic addition becomes the equivalent of if a==3 && b==5 then 8. I will most definitely not show that. My best guess
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I plan to hold a relatively informal talk about declarative macros in Rust at $DAYJOB and the colleague who organizes that used an LLM to write the invitation flavor text.
I don't hate it for that. It does some text formatting with emojis and whatnot, which is decent enough. It does have information about declarative macros, so it can throw in some rough ideas what listeners can expect, like reduced boilerplate. What I certainly like less is that it sounds like the most bombastic salesperson, and of course doesn't know what my talk will actually be about, so it just promises everything.
Including some straight-up non-sense, like apparently I'll show folks how to use declarative macros to "improve performance". That genuinely had us wondering, if that's possible. I'm guessing, you could theoretically pre-compute a value at compile-time, but them being declarative macros, you'd have to do horrid constructs, like basic addition becomes the equivalent of if a==3 && b==5 then 8. I will most definitely not show that. My best guess is that it saw that it's about Rust, so it just threw in "performance" somewhere. 🫠
Well, and of course, it repeats itself and writes lots of empty phrases. The text for the invitation is almost as long as my notes for the talk...
EMA-AI-L protocol that turns your prompt into AI slop during transit, but contains a header with the original prompt so the recipient gets your actual message without bullshit attached.
I see this as an unambiguous win, if it actually works as shown.
The important messages are conveyed, and the dick-measuring about who can seem the most interactive and professional gets derailed.
Edit: Or whatever the reason behind the extra length is. I'm at a level of not getting how to add it where I'm not even sure why it's in demand. Seeming professional and interactive is just my guess.
Now that I have my MiSTer FPGA up and running, I have been jumping back into a bunch of N64 games. The shock of playing Star Wars Shadow of the Empire and Star Wars Rogue Squadron back-to-back is real. The shift in quality is astounding.
dontsayaword
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PHLAK
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in reply to Fedo ¶ • • •Rats are brilliant animal model for biological studies relating to humans due to significant similarities to us. I will say though seeing a result in a single study on rats doesn't mean "definitive this is how it works in humans" and think the video should have concluded in a less "and that's the answer" way.
Cool video, just iffy conclusion.