Or the better formula: Find a small niche you're passionate about, thats too small for the large companies but perfectly reasonable for you and small/mid size team.
Nice video. There have been some modern hypercard attempts, has anyone used any of those? They seemed pretty promising during the wave of "no-code" just before LLMs entered the scene. But hypercard still grants users the joy of creation, which is mostly lost when interacting with an LLM.
A while back I built a magic-themed game to solve the problem of getting younger kids past visual block-coding tools(scratch etc) and into real programming. It's called Lambda Spellcrafting Academy. Kids craft spells using logic and function composition, learning core concepts like conditionals, functions, and recursion in a fun way. If you’re a technical parent and want your child to have a strong foundation, consider taking a look.
Did you know the soundtrack was composed in a module tracker? Someone recently recorded the full soundtrack playing back in Milkytracker. Pretty neat since you can see how the composers wrote the songs.
Hey this is pretty cool! Have you thought about putting it online? I've occasionally used tools like Adobe's color scheme finder, where you upload an image and it suggests a fitting colorscheme derived from the photo. Though honestly theirs doesn't perform too well.
So I understand wanting to build emulators so that people can continue to play their old games after the hardware fails. But in building an emulator for a current generation console, it seems likely that much of the audience is just interested in pirating the games.
Impressive memory optimizations. Streaming out converted pixel values was a neat way of pulling off the "framebuffer" without having enough memory for storing all the 16 bit values. Solid engineering.
I built a little game around the idea of a visual representation of s-expressions. It is meant to make it easier for newcomers to learn to program. The visualization not only allows you to edit programs more easily, but also to observe it as it runs.
Thanks for sharing! I'm currently trying out a bootstrapped hw project myself, and have enjoyed following along with your progress.
You mentioned having trouble working with vendors, was this for ex: having boards assembled? I guess I've probably gotten "lucky" with relatively low scale so far, but been happy with the assorted online PCBA services.
This is why most "semiconductor" companies are actually fabless, focusing on design while working with a partner(like TSMC) to have their designs manufactured.