Oh man, let's be friends! Hit me up if you wanna nerd out about LaserDiscs — m@rkchristian.ca. I have a pretty decent collection (https://markchristian.org/files/laserdiscs.txt — around 200 or so, no specific theme other than "movies I would like to have a copy of").

Have you got a setup going for digitizing these things? I've got a pitch reel on LaserDisc for a 1991 interactive TV startup that I'd love to preserve before it bitrots.

I love your stuff! As a FastMail user I have to read it in my alternative browser lest I destroy my autocomplete, though. :D

Anyhow; thanks for everything you make! I hope your face is feeling better these days.

Hilariously, I had no idea that this was his site. TIL!

To the communication angle, I've worked at two different BigCo's in my career, and both times there was a fallback system of last resort to use when our primary systems were unavailable.

“The wish is granted. Long live Jambi.”

I really wish the opposite of this (QEMU on iOS) existed. The closest I have been able to find is a build of Bochs that doesn't actually work on my iPad. Someday!

It does! https://github.com/utmapp/UTM

Wow, if I ran on iOS 9.3 I could get some use out of my old "iPad with Retina Display" (aka Ipad 3).

Fascinating! Any relation to iSH?

https://ish.app/

Different projects. iSH has the advantage of not requiring sideloading.

(I wrote iSH)

OMG

It’s far from perfect, but it’s fun to tinker in.

what do you use it for? my understanding is x86 on software arm is pretty slow (though some things are probably fine e.g. text/cli utilities)

UTM is actually not too horrible on the newer iPads with more RAM once the JIT warms up.

I really wish Foone had a blog.

He does. It's just a long series of looooooong twitter threads. ;)

I knew this was going to be a foone thread before I saw that it linked to twitter. :)

Thanks for the heads up!

I’ve always wanted to write about it, but it’s never really fit into one of my monthly themes. Many of the games on the service are available online as ordinary ROMs, often with “BS” in the title (for Broadcast Satellite). I’m sure the experience of using the system and playing along to synchronized audio was pretty wonderful, but the games themselves just played like ordinary cartridges once they’d be downloaded. Unlike the Sega Channel, Satellaview games could be downloaded into special cartridges and kept around indefinitely.

Amazingly enough, http://www.retro.live has a working implementation of XBAND. You can see a demo of it in the excellent Wrestling With Gaming documentary on XBAND: https://youtu.be/k_5M-z_RUKA?t=3448

Holy Shit! That's incredible. Thanks for the link.

Even cooler that it works on Analogue Super NT. That's two layers of video game history preservation right there :) After all, eventually, some day, the last working SNES unit will fail...

I don't see very much information on retro.live's page, but I hope they heed the lesson of Xband's demise and open source the important bits of their work in some time.

I'm sad that they didn't get anything meaningful on the retro.live website before the documentary launched. Seems like a massive wasted opportunity. Why not document the project? There's nothing on the site.