u/jxanno

Any love for REH's westerns? I've found these quite hard to get ahold of in a physical reading edition - it's all 650 page hardbacks/beautiful multi-volume dust jacketed sets at collectors' prices or bodged-together 200-character-wide doorstops.

After reading Mountain Man in the best format I could find, I liked it enough that I ended up taking the Wikisource texts and typesetting them myself just to get a decent readable paperback to beat up. There ended up being lots of little quirks to these stories that make them difficult to typeset with a simple Python conversion of the text (strange language, OCR errors, ...). I'm also finding that Wikisource occasionally disagrees with Gutenberg Australia's editions. I'm editing them by hand as I read and trying to get something high quality, but am only ~100 pages in.

In case they're useful to people I've marked these versions (including my work) as being in the public domain and uploaded the PDFs ready for print. I'm also planning to find some quality public domain art to use for covers and release the LaTeX source files under some permissive license.

... also just happy to discuss the stories if anyone has thoughts/favourites to look out for.

A little under two weeks ago on Sunday evening, while dreading going back to work on Monday, I off-handedly looked up how big the Ricoh 2A03 instruction set was and thought "oh hey, I bet I could easily model that - zero alloc - in Go". I believe something like that must be an emu development canon event, because I've spent every spare waking hour since trying to build a full production-quality emulator and get it fast, hardware accurate and highly compatible.

Here's where I am:

1. Sub-cycle accurate (I completely gutted out the instruction-level emulation once I found out that was an accuracy dead-end) and every "hard to emulate" game I could find works great
2. Proven correct against blargg's (and others') test ROMs, with automated tests as a backstop against regressions
3. ~80 mappers. Basically everything for the licensed library and quite a bit beyond. So many friggin' mappers to model!
4. Zero memory allocation after initialisation. I was aware that Go's GC would be the primary reason a project like this hit a hard wall against being any good, so I built it from the start to not generate any garbage.
5. NTSC, PAL and Dendy working 100% (timing, APU tables, frame pacing)
6. Save states
7. Builds to a single binary without any CMake, CGo, or other external dependencies. Made possible with ebitengine as the frontend. Linux/macOS/Windows. I'm in the process of updating the releases page with more pre-builts, but a `go install codeberg.org/JohnAnthony/tanuki/cmd/tanuki@latest` should work pretty much anywhere.
8. Builds a libretro core, which also means it supports netplay, rewind, and look-ahead enough to compensate for TV refresh rates.
9. .fm2 movie recording/replay compatible with FCEUX.
10. An RL agent interface to run N emulator instances for fast machine learning. I taught some really dumb genetic algorithms to play Excitebike badly.
11. Configuration screen, key rebinding, all that usual good stuff. Gamepads should generally work out of the box on all systems so long as they're even remotely close to meeting W3C standards.

Code's on Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/JohnAnthony/tanuki

Interested in talking about timing rabbit holes, the cycle-stepped clock + sub-cycle timing stuff was a real nightmare and I got it working but it's all a bit of a blur.

Just generally glad to be here and have the bug. In parallel I've started work on a Master System emulator as my second emu project, and I suspect I'll keep going after that.