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Hi there! I’m nyanpasu64 and I like headpats.
This is my blog about low-level and human-scale programming, hardware tinkering, DSP, and computer music and chiptune, where I share things that others might enjoy or learn from.
Exploring the appearance of CRT televisions and monitors
There's a recurring school of thought that the best way to experience the visuals of pre-HD console and PC games is to play them on period-accurate CRT displays. CRT images have a characteristic rich colorful look, with soft warm scanlines and crisp phosphors, as well as zero (added) latency and unmatched motion characteristics, all which make CRTs so beloved by retro gamers. Here we will explore how TV/monitor construction and operation create the various features making up up the CRT look.
A filesystem only a penguin could love
About a year ago, when loading games onto my Wii's USB hard drive (shhhh), I found the hard drive would not mount on the Wii but only on Linux. Although I initially suspected a disk incompatibility, digging revealed a bizarre rabbit hole, where broken Linux FAT32 resizing tools produced corrupt partition headers only recognized by Linux, which fsck couldn't fix, and PhotoRec outright hung on when reading.
Adjusting the backlight PWM frequency on an Ivy Bridge laptop
After chip-level-flashing a Ivy Bridge Dell laptop (Inspiron 15R SE 7520) with a corrupted BIOS chip (the BIOS spontaneously corrupted in 2014 then I fried the EC trying to reflash the BIOS, but that's a story for another time), I was disappointed to find that the backlight was dimmed using PWM at 200 Hz (a period of 5ms).
Playing Stray (2022) on a CRT TV in 480i
One of my recent projects was to get my PC to output 480i signals to my recently acquired Trinitron TV for running modern and historical games on a CRT TV. (I'd definitely be better served by a CRT monitor, but I didn't have one and still don't 😿.)
Porting my blog to Zola
🔗 Moving away from GitHub Pages and Jekyll I've hosted my blog for a few years on GitHub Pages and Jekyll, sporadically updating it with new content. Recently I've grown frustrated with the difficulty of writing posts, and synchronizing drafts between devices without pushing to m…
Implementing low-latency shared/exclusive mode audio output/duplex
Audio output and duplex is actually quite tricky, and even libraries like RtAudio's ALSA backend get it wrong. If you're writing an app that needs low-latency audio without glitches, the proper implementation architecture differs between apps talking to pull-mode (well-designed, low-latency) mixing daemons, and apps talking to hardware.
The missing guide for Arch Linux PKGBUILD's pkgver() version numbers
Pacman's version comparison algorithm was designed over a decade ago to properly sort many categories of real-world version numbers, and is now set in stone, quirks and all. Later on, the AUR developed pkgver() conventions and templates which turn Git commits into version numbers…
ExoTracker Newsletter #2 - Pivoting to SNES, designing an instrument list
For those of you who aren't already aware, ExoTracker is a tracker-like composing tool, based around subdividing beats instead of integer rows. This allows the user to place notes at arbitrary fractions of a beat (like sheet music), and additionally allows tracker-like delay effe…
An unsafe tour of Rust's Send and Sync
Rust's concurrency safety is based around the Send and Sync traits. For people writing safe code, you don't really need to understand these traits on a deep level, only enough to satisfy the compiler when it spits errors at you (or switch from std threads to Crossbeam scoped threads to make errors go away).
ExoTracker Issues - Abandoning the grid
Trackers have decades of design, with interlocking features and design decisions, many based on the assumption that every event is quantized on a grid: You don't need lines above events, since it's obvious which row the event is in. In regular trackers, events are treated as ta…
ExoTracker Newsletter #1
I just finished implementing timeline entry editing. Since I have school coming up, I decided to release a demo of its current state. Since my summary was getting a bit too long to post in Discord, I decided to write a blog post / newsletter. 🔗 Demo download Windows 64-bit: https…
Describing convolution using item-based indexing and inclusive ranges
This is a follow-up to my previous post, "The gridline mental model of indexing and slicing". I split this out because it's related to DSP as well as programming, and may not be as interesting to the broader programming audience. In some cases, it's useful to think of …
The gridline mental model of indexing and slicing
Republished from my Github gist. Integer indexes can either represent fenceposts (gridlines) or item pointers, and there's a sort of duality. 🔗 Mental model: Gridline-based "asymmetric indexing" Memory or data is treated as a "pool of memory". Pointers and ind…