http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog Opinions and takes from ya boi, Goldside543 en-us Fri, 5 Jun 2026 http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog/upgrades.html http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog/upgrades.html Fri, 5 Jun 2026 So this site's just been upgraded big-time! Two major changes! Well, first off, this server is now being hosted on a fiber network instead of a DSL network. And initially, this even presented a problem. This site is being tunneled to you through a VPN, for the purpose of keeping myself anonymous. And that tunnel was originally over the TCP protocol. And if you don't know what that is, well, Google exists, but basically, it's a protocol that handles packets with intense care and babysitting, to ensure they reach the destination alright. Well, little did I know how unnecessary it was to have a TCP tunnel when the web's already TCP. Well, back when I was using DSL, it limited itself from fighting with itself, so it wasn't a problem. Well, upon upgrading my network, packets now fire like crazy, and that led to the server actually becoming inefficient and slower. So I redid the tunnel and now use UDP, which just chucks packets and calls it a day. This is absolutely fine for tunnels, because the TCP used by the website already ensures the integrity of the packets. So TL;DR, TCP-over-TCP go BOOM BOOM GRAHH BAD BAD and TCP-over-UDP go VROOOOOM GOOD GOOD. So I use the latter now. That's my summary of it, and it's probably not really accurate, but I did the best I could to explain it. Anyway, you'll notice that the site is definitely faster! http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog/hiatus.html http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog/hiatus.html Sun, 26 Apr 2026 Well, if you were a fan of this blog, today's your lucky day, because I'm going to try to get this thing running again! My apologies for being gone so long, I've had a life to live and quite frankly, I forgot about this blog. I posted a little bit on Mastodon like... last week or so until I lost interest. Then I remembered, "oh shit, I haven't updated the blog in like 300 years!" So I'm returning! If I don't immediately lose interest again tomorrow. I try my best. I haven't even done anything tech related in a long, long time either. So, what HAVE I been doing while I was gone? Mmm, not much, pretty much eating, sleeping, and going outside, shockingly enough for someone like me. My skin is even slightly tanned now. Another thing that motivated me to come back, recent events. I've been watching politics, too, and I ain't liking what I'm seeing. For instance, legislature that would make operating systems have to check user age or something like that. How is that going to work for people who make hobbyist operating systems? How's that gonna work for Linux distributions? There are SO many things wrong with this! Rant over. Anyway, I'm a little motivated to get back into OS dev again. In January, I said I was gonna start developing Ultraspace, Goldspace's successor project, soon. By soon, I was hoping for like... in a couple months. Four months later, I still haven't started anything. Procrastination. Just like why I put off writing articles for the blog. http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog/bigbro.html http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog/bigbro.html Mon, 9 Feb 2026 I apologize for my rather lengthy exodus from the blog. Life happens. I was busy playing some Kerbal Space Program and blowing ass at chess. But just today, I became aware of news that I find very disturbing. Over the next month or so, Discord is gonna lock down its features and make you send your ID or a photo of yourself, just to access the platform's 18+ content. And this comes after they've ALREADY had a data breach that resulted in people's government IDs getting leaked. I can't even think of any jokes. I have no words. What kind of 1984 ass shit is this?! I remember thinking that we were far as hell away from a 1984-like world. But look, it's right here. Platform after platform is doing this. You won't see any of this dumb shit from me, that's for sure. But it's not entirely Discord's fault. Governments are responsible for this. First, I believe it started in Europe, particularly the UK. They rolled out ID verification just so you could watch pornographic content. I think it extended beyond porn not too long after, though. Then Australia banned social media for people under 16. Isn't that around drinking age, or even above drinking age? Australians can booze but can't look at social media? The fuck? Then it rolled to America, the (alleged) land of the free and the brave. At this point, I began first noticing the censorship. I'm an avid fan of the YouTuber Brewstew. Because he cusses a lot, his videos began getting age restricted. So I thought "bah, it's nothing, I'll just sign into my throwaway Google account to watch his channel." Then guess what? They wanted my ID. Or my face. Bull-fucking-shit. I just downloaded his videos with a third party YouTube video downloader and watched them locally. I don't know what else to say. Other than don't give those fuckers a damn thing. Just don't use these platforms unless necessary. Stay safe. http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog/wt64a.html http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog/wt64a.html Mon, 19 Jan 2025 Haha, one of the biggest curveballs ever thrown in the Internet Arcade Blog history! Mostly because the history's only been two months. Behold, in its full glory, the West Text 64 Alpha! Remember how in my last post, I said I was cooking up a game? Well, this most certainly is NOT it! Haha, double curveball! What this is is just a little bit of a for fun thing. West Text 64 is going to be a Nintendo 64 text adventure game set in the wild west. So don't worry if you were wanting a hellishly difficult platformer, that's still coming! I'm a little kooky sometimes, and I do weird things. And weird things includes making homebrew Nintendo 64 games. Yes, homebrew. Not just replicating the Nintendo 64, this IS a true blue Nintendo 64 game, it runs on Nintendo 64 hardware, it's a ROM and everything. What's the motivation here? Well, you see, it all started this morning. I decided to take a trip down memory lane and check out the Nintendo website circa 2000, back when everything was about the Nintendo 64. I've been studying the homebrew scene for the Nintendo 64 for months now, and I'm gonna stick my toe in with something simple. Just a little text game. No graphics or anything. Sure, it won't have all the shiny fun things that the Nintendo 64 can do, like 3D graphics, but it's good enough. Notice how going to the N64-era Nintendo website was enough to incite me to make a Nintendo 64 game. Well, that's me, Mr. Impulsive. After all this reading, you probably want to try West Text 64 Alpha for yourself, don't you? Of course you do, why WOULDN'T you? Well, you can download it here, slap that baby into an emulator, or even onto an Everdrive, if that's your thing, and have fun with the solid 30 seconds of gameplay that I have done right now! Have fun! http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog/chip.html http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog/chip.html Sun, 18 Jan 2026 Around last Thursday, I unfortunately caught a cold. In the meantime, to entertain myself, I decided to take up CHIP-8 programming, my first venture back into game development since... the fuckin... uh... fast pair of shoes Sonic ripoff game that I started last year and gave up on within weeks. As a matter of fact, you can play it right here, in this very blog post! It's like a miracle of scientific knowledge! Everything that's ever been invented and done practically culiminated in being able to play Monster Battle inside of a blog post! Press W to start the game, Q to attack, and S to heal! There's also a super extra special secret attack you can do, but you can find that for yourself! Anyway, writing that was a fun experience. The CHIP-8 is a very delightful machine to write code for, especially considering how easy it is to understand. It's nothing like x86, folks! Sure, Monster Battle here isn't really that good, you can tell by the way the title screen sprite is fucked up bad, but you know, it was still a fun thing to do. And it got me thinking, man... I wanna make games again. Thing is, I suck at finishing things I start. You know that because it takes me eons to update projects, and the fact that many of my projects are incommunicado. Dungeon, anyone? Nobody remember when I tried to make a game with the Source engine? Fun fact about that particular game, it's literally fucking gone. I formatted my drive and forgot that Dungeon was on it. This was an action that obliterated absolutely everything that I worked on in my early days in software engineering. Nearly every program I wrote from mid 2023 to early 2024 except for the lucky ones who got backed up on GitHub are GONE. Even took some of my game saves. You win some, you lose a lot, I reckon. So what's next for me in game dev? Well, for my next game, I'm planning for it to be a sorta IWBTG-style game. My last post here was about Nintendo Hard games. Well, I'm inspired. I did a bit of research into it, and I see the light. I see the light of torture and pain and anguish. I've played hardcore mode Minecraft a few times myself, I know how painful it is to lose a world, I've felt rage, and it feels nice to overcome tough shit. Even better when it's absurdly tough, troll-tier shit. Nothing but speculation, of course. Not even I know if I'm gonna do it. It all depends on whether I'm up to the job. Could become reality, though. I imagine play-testing it would be a major bitch, though. Personally, I suck at hard games, regardless of whether I created it or not. I'm the type of guy who instinctually picks easy mode. Don't judge me, I'm having fun. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some things to take care of. Like continuing to suck at Baseball for the NES. http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog/hard.html http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog/hard.html Sun, 11 Jan 2026 This past couple of weeks, I've been playing old NES games. One of the biggest differences between old and new games is that old games are fucking HARD. It took me 40-50 strokes on hole 2 in Golf. I lost with a score of 6-7 in Baseball. That time, I cried, and reluctantly did the hand thing. Still don't really get the 6 7 meme. Anyway, in Contra, I die before I so much as get to the third stage with the fuckin... waterfalls. And if I'm not using the Konami code, much earlier than that. In Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, I can't beat 1-2. Hell, in the original game, I can't beat World 8! In Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, I can't beat Mr. Sandman. So why are these games so hard? From what I can tell, they still thought they were in the arcade days when games were intended to suck money and be addicting. Say, wait a minute... did we come full circle in that aspect? Instead of sucking quarters for more continues, now they're sucking dollars for the newest "HOLY FUCKAROO" skin! Shit, getting off track. Hard games. I'm honestly surprised that when you Google "hard bosses", you don't get any results for many NES games. But you certainly see Mike Tyson on those lists. Though, it's not all just game design intending to be frustrating, there were technical limits. They didn't really have saves. The Legend of Zelda certainly has a save system, though. Not exactly sure how it works, but I think something goes onto the cartridge... some kind of ROM... thingy... I don't know. Onto Baseball. It took me three games before I saw a win. That game is jank as hell. Have you ever seen an MLB game where you hit the ball, the batter goes running for first base, and the guy at first base just stands there like "oh what the fuck?! where the fuck am I?! I'm just gonna sit here like a fucking idiot!"? No? Well, you'll certainly see it in NES Baseball! So many times that you'll probably bite your controller. Like I did. It tasted like plastic. Now, take Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels. They have no fucking excuse. Those people just wanted to see you in pain. Even Nintendo of America thought they were trying to give children fucking brain aneurysms and released an entirely different game. Golf? I suck at Golf, no matter the platform, so that game gets an excuse. Something else that astounds me is how badly kids today fuck up NES games. How do they lose to Glass fucking Joe? How many times does that first Goomba from 1-1 need to kill before his ass gets promoted to King Goomba? I saw one nearly grown woman call a Koopa a goddamn peacock! I'm literally their age and they're making ME feel old! Can't think of anything else. I'm too angry at these damn Zoomers and how inept they are at NES games. Until next time, valued readers. http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog/w95.html http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog/w95.html Sun, 28 Dec 2025 Today, I was bored and decided to mess around in a Windows 95 VM. But first, I wanna deliver some sad news. Google finally removed HTTP support. If you're wondering what I mean by that, Google formerly supported plain HTTP, as in, you didn't even need a secure connection to use the basic services, like... you know, Googling. This made it accessible on ancient ass devices and operating systems, like Windows 95. I reckon with all they've been doing (like with Gemini or whatever that thing's called), they got sick of maintaining it. Sad to see it go. The minimum browser version got bumped up by a massive margin. Now, it takes browser versions from the early 2010s to use Google, like Internet Explorer 10, for example. Not even Windows 7 is enough for the job. I'm more attached to legacy systems than most, I suppose. I find old GUIs charming, though anything before Windows 95 and it's clunky, I don't really like Windows 1.0 to 3.1 for that reason. What about this website? Well, considering it's literally using HTTP at this very moment, it still supports browsers from the 90s. However, most of the time, I outsource images to other websites because my internet is weak. Those other websites tend to use HTTPS, more often than not, and that means Windows 9x won't be able to load those images. I don't know if I'm supposed to be using other websites as my own shitty personal CDN, but damn it, it works and I'm gonna do it anyway. You won't find very many HTTP websites these days, though. I can name a grand total of three off the top of my head: this one, OldVersion, and FrogFind or whatever the hell it was called. Granted, HTTP isn't secure, and HTTPS is a far better option. I only use it here because I'm too broke to afford Portmap's premium tier. Damn bullshit cashgrab. Fortunately, no sensitive information ever gets sent over this website, so it's fine. If I ever wanted to add logging in, we'd have a problem. Toodaloo. I think that's how you spell that. Who cares. http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog/spaceinvaders.html http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog/spaceinvaders.html Sun, 21 Dec 2025 You know how the site's called the Internet Arcade? Yeah, maybe I should talk about arcade games for this blog entry! How people played games back in the stone age, before we had fancy things like PCs or home consoles! Well, you already know my favorite, because I titled the post after it! It's really a classic, and similarly to The Legend of Zelda, the game I reviewed a couple days ago, really fun for its time! There's also Donkey Kong, another damn fine game. There's also the three already ported to this site, Pong, Snake, and as of the 16th of this month, Space Invaders. Fun fact that everybody already knows, Pong was the first video game! This post was pretty much just a way to announce I added a new game to the site. Meh. Bye bye! (This post was intended to release on December 16th, however I fell asleep and later grew too lazy to finish it. Until now.) http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog/funnybugs.html http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog/funnybugs.html Mon, 15 Dec 2025 "A new post? Now? But you only posted the last one an hour ago!" Yeah, but I'm bored, plus it's around the middle of the night, so it's a new day. New day, new post! So I've had this post on the agenda ever since a few days ago, when I decided to look at this site's robots.txt and found out that I accidentally put in .html as .txt. Every occurence of it. And that was on there for over a year. Bots could just freely roam those pages. Boy, was I dumb! Or just tired. Probably tired. Those are what I like to call funny bugs! Bugs that are just so dumb or funny that you look back on them and laugh instead of cry. The second funny bug I'm gonna talk about is also my own! Goldspace had a bug where the VGA Mode 13h driver worked... except it would output nothing but smilely faces. Of all the symbols, it had to TAUNT me with damned SMILES! Never mind, it's not that deep, it probably just happened to pick that symbol. This one isn't funny in the "ohh derp, one-line fix, stupid me" way, but it was bizarre, and comedy is from the unexpected. Or something like that. I don't know how that goes at the moment. Let's see, another goodie. I couldn't think of anymore from my own software, so I decided to Google "funny bugs", but that only gave me funny looking bugs, shit. So I'm gonna look back into personal experience for this one. Skyrim. Whenever you got hit by a Giant, you flew to the goddamn stratosphere. I mean you could practically see ALL of Skyrim. But Skyrim's a Bethesda game, and those are bound to have bugs. If I remember correctly, when you ride a horse off a cliff/mountain, the horse dies, and you're fine! Or was that in Minecraft? Or does that even exist at all? Maybe I SHOULDN'T be writing articles in the middle of the night... Welp, three's a good number, isn't it? That's all, folks! ...damn, I already used "That's all, folks!" once, didn't I? Yep, I did. In the first post of the blog, too! Oh well. http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog/tloz.html http://goldside543-56173.portmap.host:56173/blog/tloz.html Sun, 14 Dec 2025 This one'll be a short one. I just want to share my thoughts on that hit 1986 game, The Legend of Zelda. I've been playing it for a few hours at a time since yesterday, and I've just been taking my time. The Legend of Zelda has got CRAZY depth for a 1986 game. You'd expect grinding in a modern, 2010s game, but never in 1986! But alas, I ran out of bombs in Level 3 and had to leave to kill enemies until I got a drop. It's a shame that it's a little hard to get into it, due to having one of the worst cases of "Guide Dang It!" I've ever seen. You pretty much HAVE to have the manual or at least some form of resource to know what you're doing. Apparently, they didn't have enough room to put a tutorial. I guess they had more important things to add. Like a big ass open world. You'll also be pleased by the many Engrish lines in this game. Translators in the 1980s were notorious for half-assing shit. Nah, scratch that, they did the best they could. Even if the best they could was "It's a secret to everybody." Whatever that means. But you can't be mad. Shitty translation brought us the almighty "All your base are belong to us" and that's a blessing. By the way, if you want a laugh (and a symbol lesson), look up Level 3 and look at the map. Yes, it's something you've seen before, and something you hopefully don't support. At least not in the way that a certain man from Austria used it in the 1930s-1940s. Doh, I'm getting off-topic! Better end the article here. See ya!