u/OrbisMaximus

Researchers from Egypt’s Nuclear Materials Authority described unusually radioactive Quaternary sediments around Qusor El Arab, with some samples reportedly reaching around 2,600 parts per million uranium.

Ancient Egypt religion described a remote primordial era called Zep Tepi, the First Time, when gods were said to have established order in the world. Kingship, sacred architecture, astronomy and ritual were repeatedly presented as continuations of patterns established in that distant beginning.

That does not mean the Egyptians were remembering a technological civilization from 100,000 years ago.

But myths are not technical archives either. If human societies had existed across vastly deeper periods of prehistory, later cultures might have misunderstood whatever fragments survived. A ruined structure could become the house of a god. An ancient catastrophe could become a cosmic battle.

After 100,000 years, almost nothing recognizable might remain. Metals would corrode. Buildings would collapse and deserts would erase the surfaces.

Nuclear chemistry is harder to erase. A reactor can leave long-lived uranium-236, iodine-129, and neutron-capture signatures in samarium and gadolinium, precisely the kinds of traces that have yet to be searched for in Fayum.

Perhaps the story is exactly what geology says it is.

But if an unknown civilization had existed in the deep human past, almost everything we now call myth would be a distorted memory, and almost everything physical would have become indistinguishable from the landscape itself.

Only a few unusual fingerprints might remain.

More history and deeper dives at Orbis Maximus

They appeared at the entrance to Edo Bay in July 1853, four American warships moving toward the heart of Tokugawa Japan. Two were enormous steam frigates, their dark hulls cutting through the water while coal smoke poured from their funnels. They did not need the wind to move. To people watching from the Japanese shore, that alone made them different from almost every ship they had ever seen.

These were the ships that became known as the Kurofune, the Black Ships. Their decks carried heavy naval guns, their masts towered above the bay, and their paddle wheels churned the water as Japanese boats approached them. Perry had not come merely to deliver a letter. The fleet itself was part of the message.

Japan already knew what Western naval power could do. Only a decade earlier, Qing China had been defeated by Britain in the First Opium War. Japanese officials understood that refusing Perry could eventually mean facing the same kind of conflict. The terrifying part was not that Japan had never heard of steamships. It was that the threat they had been studying for years had finally appeared directly outside Edo.

Perry deliberately increased that pressure. He rejected the usual demand that foreign ships go to Nagasaki, surveyed the bay despite Japanese objections, and insisted on dealing with high ranking officials. Every movement of the squadron demonstrated that the Americans were willing to ignore the rules Japan had used to control foreign contact for centuries.

When Perry returned the following year, he came with an even larger fleet. The result was the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854. It did not immediately open Japan to unrestricted trade, but it broke the old diplomatic barrier and began a chain of events that destabilized the Tokugawa political order.

Within fifteen years, the shogunate was gone.

I just completed my first public version of Terminal Babylon, a terminal-based crime simulator set in Yokohama, 1985.

The whole open world is procedurally generated, so every new game creates a different Yokohama with its own streets, districts, businesses, railways, coastline and places to discover.

You start small and slowly build up your own gang. You can recruit gangsters, rob businesses, steal cars, gamble, smuggle goods, take jobs and get involved in bigger criminal operations as your reputation grows. Civilians, police and rival gangs also move around the city, so it feels more like a little living world.

There’s quite a lot going on under the hood with the simulation, and I’m sure there are still plenty of things I could improve or expand. I’d be very happy about any feedback, especially if you notice something that feels off, or if you have ideas for interesting systems, events or interactions that could fit the game.

You can download it for free on itch.io if you’d like to try it. I’d genuinely love to hear what people think.

The Sphinx’s human head has always looked rather small for the amount of lion attached to it.

So I tried a reconstruction with a larger lion’s head and an uneroded body. The proportions suddenly look much less like a design mistake and much more like an actual lion.

One possibility is that the original head was later recarved into a pharaoh. This would have been technically possible, because turning a large head into a smaller one mainly requires chisels, patience, and a ruler with no shortage of self-esteem.

There is no proof, of course. The different erosion may simply come from harder limestone in the head.

Still, I can imagine the conversation:

“Magnificent sacred lion, Your Majesty.”

“Yes.”

“Ancient guardian of the horizon.”

“Yes.”

“Shall we leave it as it is?”

“No. Make it look like me.”

I’ve been working on a small cleanup pass for AI-generated images and wanted to get some outside eyes on it.

The main thing I’m trying to fix is the tiny speckled texture that often shows up in generated images, especially in detailed areas like foliage, fabric, water, stone, hair, and small highlights. I’m not trying to repaint the image or make it look like a different style. The goal is just to make the image feel cleaner while keeping the original detail and composition intact.

I attached a before and after. To me, the after looks cleaner and less “AI noisy,” but I’m trying to judge whether it still feels natural or if it starts to look too processed.

I’m also wondering if there are other common AI-image artifacts I should be paying attention to besides the small dot noise and color speckles. I know hands, text, and object mistakes are a different problem, but for general image cleanup, I’m curious what people notice first.

Would appreciate honest feedback.

I’ve been refining my desert demo, and it’s starting to feel like its own little place.

The idea is simple: a vast procedural dune field that keeps unfolding as you move through it. Under the surface, the landscape is built from a voxel-style structure that could theoretically represent hundreds of millions of voxels.

But the goal is not scale for scale’s sake. It’s about exploring what is still possible on normal CPUs using straightforward framebuffer-based concepts - simple rules, efficient rendering, and a world that feels much larger than what is actually being drawn at any given moment.

A small Orbis C ocean rendering experiment.

The surface is not stored as a heightmap and it is not rendered as a mesh. Each frame, the ocean is evaluated mathematically from procedural wave functions and drawn in a voxel-space style.

One interesting comparison: representing the same visible area as a naive uniform heightmap at near-camera density would require hundreds of millions of height samples / virtual voxels.

The demo version includes camera movement, altitude control, swim/follow mode, adjustable ripples, crest/trough shading, a background sky, and looping ocean audio.

Attached is a short video of the current result.

Hi everyone, I’ve been working on a small tool called Orbis Scaler.

The main goal is batch-processing AI-generated art into cleaner pixel-art-style assets. Instead of only resizing an image, the newest version can downscale edge preserved to fixed retro-style resolutions, apply stronger pixelation, optionally reduce the colour palette with k-means, and then upscale with nearest neighbor when a larger preview or final output size is needed.

This is useful for workflows like:

• turning AI concept art into more game-ready pixel-art references
• batch converting many images at once
• testing retro console-style resolutions such as 320x200 or 160x100
• creating larger preview images with nearest-neighbor upscaling
• reducing colours for a more authentic limited-palette look

The new version has simple settings:

-p 0..5   pixelation strength
-c N      limit output to N colours
-c 0      no palette restriction

I attached the original verification source image plus comparison collages showing different pixelation and colour settings.

It still will not magically make something look fully hand-drawn, but the goal is to reduce the soft anti-aliased / blurry AI look and make the output more usable as a pixel-art starting point.

The tool is called Orbis Scaler. It is available on itch.io under Orbis Basic.

Hi everyone! I’m working on Orbis Scaler, a small standalone tool for converting images into low-resolution pixel-art-style results.

The idea is to preserve shapes, edges, contrast, and important details better than a simple resize filter, especially at small resolutions like 320×200 and 160×100. The result can also be upscaled again with nearest-neighbor scaling, so the pixels stay crisp for pixel art conversion.

Attached are the original input image, a 320×200 and 160×100 upscaled result for comparison.

Orbis Scaler is available as a free download on the Orbis Basic itch.io page.

I’ve been playing with a slightly questionable idea: what if my BASIC compiler for the Sega 32X could include demoscene-style voxel effects as part of the game engine.

The first experiment is a procedural ocean / heightfield renderer: low-res voxel-space style water, fixed-point math, camera movement, glide/swim modes.

I’m honestly not sure if this is a good idea or a terrible one. It sits somewhere between retro BASIC, old-school demo effects, and just exploring the possibilities for fun :)

Hey everyone,

I’m working on ORBIS BASIC 32X, a retro-future BASIC compiler for making real Sega 32X / Mega 32X homebrew.

The original idea was simple: write BASIC code, reference images/audio, and build a real bootable .32x ROM. Not a fantasy console, not an emulator scripting layer, but an actual Sega 32X ROM that can run in emulators and, with the right setup, on real hardware.

The project has now grown into something more interesting for indie devs: the same ORBIS BASIC project can also be built as a native Linux app and a native Windows app.

So instead of choosing between “retro console project” and “PC release,” the idea is:

one codebase
build a Sega 32X ROM
build a Linux version
build a Windows version

That opens up a nice workflow for games, demos, interactive toys, visual experiments and retro-style releases. You can make something with the limits and identity of the Sega 32X, but still offer PC versions for people who do not use emulators or retro hardware.

The Linux build also makes the project interesting for retro handheld devices, including Anbernic-style handhelds and the wider retro handheld market. An ORBIS BASIC game could potentially exist as a real .32x ROM, a desktop release, and a Linux handheld build for devices that support native games or ports.

The compiler handles automatic asset baking. Images and audio can be referenced directly from BASIC code, and the compiler prepares them for the target build. The goal is to avoid a huge external toolchain and keep the workflow simple.

Recent builds also added mouse support, including Sega/Mega Mouse support on 32X and matching desktop mouse support for Linux/Windows builds.

I think this kind of multi-platform release path is interesting for indie development: a project can live as a real retro console ROM, a desktop game, a handheld Linux release, a homebrew release, and potentially something that could be tested on flash cartridge hardware or prepared for physical cartridge production.

Project page:
https://orbismagic.itch.io/orbis-basic

I’d be happy to hear thoughts from indie devs, especially about the idea of releasing the same game as a desktop app, a handheld Linux game, and a real retro console ROM.

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share a project I have been developing called ORBIS BASIC 32X.

ORBIS BASIC 32X is a retro futuristic BASIC compiler for creating real Sega 32X and Mega 32X software. You write programs in a BASIC style language, run the compiler, and get a bootable .32x ROM that can be tested in an emulator or on compatible hardware.

This is not a fantasy console or an emulator scripting layer. The output is an actual Sega 32X ROM containing native SH 2 machine code, compiled program data and baked in assets.

The goal is to make Sega 32X development more immediate, creative and accessible while still respecting the hardware direction. The compiler uses a compact SH 2 runtime, direct color framebuffer graphics and a lightweight workflow focused on building actual ROMs.

It supports classic BASIC style programming with variables, strings, arrays, loops, fixed point math, drawing commands, image based presentation tools and integrated asset workflows.

One of the key features is automatic asset baking. Images and audio can be integrated into the ROM during compilation. The compiler handles conversion and integration as part of the build process, so the workflow stays direct and does not require a large external toolchain.

The compiler is also designed to be dependency free. It is distributed as a standalone Cosmopolitan executable, so the same executable can run directly across major desktop platforms without installation, package managers or platform specific setup.

The 32X is a very specific and unusual target, so part of the fun of this project is exploring what a BASIC first workflow for it can look like, with direct ROM generation, native SH 2 code, automatic asset integration and a portable standalone compiler.

An initial demo version is available to download on itch.io for anyone who wants to try it, inspect the workflow or follow the development progress.

The project is still in active development, but it already has working ROM output, documentation, examples and ongoing feature work.

I would love to hear what other Sega 32X fans and developers think of this direction.