Where are all you homebrewers from?

Hey everyone - just curious as to what major cities those of you currently working on homebrew projects are closest to. We'd love to gather some footage as we travel around of some in development NES homebrew projects as we're on the road for the documentary.

Thanks!

I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Is Indianapolis major enough? Or is my location (or lack thereof) the reason why I have never been able to enter the professional video game industry?

The major city closest to where I'm from is Geneva, although I am definitely not from Geneva (and I have hardly ever visited the city).

I'm originally from Corvallis, OR, US but have resided in Mountain View, CA, US (Silicon Valley) since 1998. Not sure how much longer I might reside here (my IBS makes relocating/travel/anything, actually, extremely difficult), particularly since I work 100% remotely for a company out of NYC and thus technically could live anywhere.

Although I am not doing any NES development and sure as hell won't finish any projects on the SNES, I just want to say that it would be really nice if people would actually fill out things about them on their profile, so that you wouldn't have to even have a thread like this. I know this is NES Dev and not a blog or something like that, but has anyone ever made or considered making a topic where you can give a background about yourself? I'm not particularly interesting, put some of the other people here, to me, seem to be. This would go under general discussion, obviously.

The "profiles" feature of the forum offers some of this, but I think you want something more in-depth and less "one-liner" stuff.

The nesdev Wiki does offer each user their own individual User page that they can edit to their hearts content and put whatever content they want there. On Wikipedia a lot of folks there use their User page for that purpose. If you aren't sure what I'm referring to as examples (and these are on Wikipedia) here's Tepples', and here's mine. Currently I use my Nesdev wiki User page for a document I'm writing about all the things Microsoft broke/changed in Windows 7 (and will never repair, 100% certain of that) compared to XP and why that keeps me on XP. (I should note I'm going to HAVE to move to Windows 7 due to hardware reasons (vendors aren't making XP drivers for newer hardware any more), but I'm putting that off as long as I possibly can)

Yep, and it's only gotten worse with Windows 8...

This has nothing to do with the original thread, but I agree the decrease of customisation for Windows' GUI is awful. And every time someone sees me on Win7 they scream and believes I'm still using windows 98, because I use the "Windows Classic" theme, and apparently most people didn't even go to the customisation screen since XP (and 7) to see that there is a fallback mode available.

It's sad but it seems 90% of the people just use the default is available to them and don't even look for options and customisation. And needless to say I do not like most of the changes that has been made recently to desktops, no matter if it is Windows, Gnome or KDE. Completely bloated, why didn't just keep them simple like they were before ? Even LDXE, the supposedly "lightweight" desktop for Linux is bloated, as windows comes with so many buttons in the top bar I don't know what is their purpose, and defaults to 4 desktops, which I don't need, 1 is enough, thanks. I still think the "Windows 95" style is the best desktop you could ever get, and I also regret to the absence of pre-made colouring theme in "Windows Classic" mode, but I still use it as I never liked XP, and W2k is way too old to support new hardware.

This has hardly anything to do with Nesdev except maybe the "nostalgia" thing, which may in fact have a bit influence on out opinion about desktops.

I'm in Ontario, Canaada, near Toronto. (Until recently was living in Toronto.)


As for desktop customization, I mostly tend to try to stick with defaults unless it's something that actually bothers me. That way if I ever use someone else's computer I will be familiar with the way it will most likely be set up. I'd like to be ready to drop-in on any computer I see, rather than sit down and be frustrated by the lack of customizations/extensions that I am so used to using constantly... For the most part I really just want the OS GUI to get out of my way and just let me run programs; I don't really care too much how it does this as long as it works okay. (Windows 8 is the first OS in a long while that I thought actually had something wrong with it in this respect.)

My pet peeve in this respect is antialiased fonts. It is hell trying to disable cleartype on Windows; and for some reason it's the hardest to get rid of with Microsoft-made software that somehow overrides the user setting for it. It usually takes me a week to figure out how to disable (almost) all of it when I get a new computer. (It's still on my start bar... the last holdout...)

I love KDE's 4 desktop setup. I wish Windows had it too (but I'm not willing to replace explorer to get it, see above). Having extra pages to organize open programs is great.

This this this. I still to this day prefer "pixel-precise" fonts. I really cannot stand the anti-aliased or ClearType/subpixel-rendered look; I find it blurry and very hard to read (and my vision isn't that great either!), not to mention I find the text drawing in the OS much slower when this garbage is turned on.

The only exception to this (for me) is when reading documentation that predominantly uses vectors (i.e. PDFs), where I find if done right it looks generally okay. Oh, and it tends to look somewhat decent on smartphones, and that's solely because the physical screen sizes are so small combined with insanely high resolutions; on computers, for example, Apple's Retina displays look mindblowing and I can see it being more useful there.

Don't feel bad or feel like you need to make excuses, Koitsu. My main computer still runs XP, for various reasons that make NES/PCE/SMS dev etc easier. I was even gutted when I had to move from '98 to XP that direct parport access has been blocked and needed IO drivers to get control back. Bleh. I'd rather be on a modernized Amiga anyway...

Anyway, I'm from Vancouver, B.C., but working/residing in Japan.

From the UK, living in Tokyo for a while now

Lausanne, Switzerland.
I actually live close to Bregalad and study close to where he works

I bet $1,000,000,000 that no one here lives even an hour away from me.

Oh yeah, Bregaland, (or anyone) do you know if there is a way to have the "fallback" style on Windows 8? It was incredibly stupid of them to get rid of the start button. Getting around on Windows 98/2000/XP/Vista(doesn't mean it doesn't suck)/7? Sure! Getting around on Windows 8, not so much...

I never used Windows 8, but I heard that of course there is a fallback mode where you can get a normal taskbar and start menu, making it alike Windows 7. I however don't know if you can get the "Windows Classic" (aka Windows 95) UI, even without themes.

Are you talking about this?


If you are, then you don't know that the start menu is actually just a picture. (Ridiculous, I know.) You can still press the button on your keyboard, but It brings you to this.


Poor Japanese hostage!

This is a tangent. If it extends, please split...
To "fix" windows 8, you can
- Install Classic Shell to get a real start menu back
- Deliberately break Aero to get Windows Classic back.
- It's straightforward to switch between Aero and AeroLite, but needlessly complicated.
(Export a theme. Unpack it (it's a zip). Edit the enclosed .theme file and change "Aero.msstyles" to "AeroLite.msstyles" or vice versa. Then load this file you just modified)
- Find a copy of the Windows 7 (and older) control panel "desk.cpl", and copy it over. It'll let you change a bunch of settings that are otherwise only changeable via registry editing. Yay Microsoft.
- Use the high-contrast themes to get something more like the old UI if you're not willing to break DWM (a few programs don't like that)

If only Texas weren't so damn big. He's the closest I know. Same state, at least.

I live and work in Phoenix, Arizona. The only other person that I can remember living here was this guy.

It's kind of weird seeing people like that who have either been on the website for one year and then quit but still did a bunch of posts, but what is even more strange to me is seeing accounts from 2006, that don't even have a single post... (I really don't get it.) I wonder, are those accounts ever going to be deleted, or are they just going to stay their forever? I think its safe to say no one is going to use them. Also, just for the heck of it, here's a map of Texas, with the top red shape being where I live and the bottom red shape being the person closest to me.