That's interesting. I mostly had the opposite experience.
I tried journaling electronically many times over the years, from basic text files with zero format, to markdown files... even a private Tumblr blog. I couldn't make any of them work for more than a couple of weeks.
The electronic thing just kinda disappeared from my vision.
I started a bullet journal about 12 months ago, and it's the first thing I've ever managed to use consistently for journaling. Partly because of the very short-form bullet points that a day of journaling is made up of, but the act of hand writing the entries and having a physical journal was the magic for me.
I wrote a decently complete NES emulator[1], and the 6502 is definitely a fun CPU to emulate compared to other CPUs. The Z80-ish CPU in the Game Boy is not as fun, and as soon as you get into 68000 territory, it definitely stops being fun for a hobbyist.
Getting the graphics and sound in sync with the CPU is a lot more challenging if you're looking to support many games, but if you just want to play some of the super simple early NES games, like Donkey Kong, then you can get away with a lot of inaccuracies.
At my last job at an email security provider, this was a huge pain in the ass. We would provision new mail servers, and because the new servers' IP reputation to Office365, Google, etc. was poor initially, someone (until it became a shell script) had to spend the better part of a week taking the new server out of rotation, putting it back in, and so forth, so not too many of our client's emails got stuck in the new server's reputation blackhole.
I was there for 10 years, and this was only a problem in the final ~2 years of my employment, which roughly lines up with your 4 years remark.
> This was also the era of “web-safe colors” — a palette of 216 colors, where every channel was one of 00, 33, 66, 99, cc, or ff — which existed because some people still had 256-color monitors! The things we take for granted now, like 24-bit color.
Ah, I remember so many evolutions of my own websites using 336699 and 6699ff as the main colors. I still default to them even now when I just need _something_ that isn't default colors.
And wow, I forgot all about image maps! I used to stare in awe of the super artistic websites that used image maps heavily, as if I was witnessing the blackest of black magic.
Kudos to getting to this point. Adding support for more mappers is a nice incremental thing that can be done at your leisure, and once you get save states implemented, playing games at your own pace is super fun :)