Oh how I've seen my share of bad scalars for old 2D games – from exaggerated CRT effects that make me feel as though I'm on LSD to interpolation routines that make every game look like its made with papercraft. Old school computers present a problem when being displayed on modern televisions that have resolutions significantly higher than the source material. Today, I provide my solution for this.

There's a persistent myth in the electronics commnity that if you want programmable logic to interface with 5V these days you have two options – very old CPLDs (Complex Programmable Logic Devices) or use level shifters to convert the 5V down to 3.3V as there are no 5V FPGA anymore. Well, I'd like to spend a few minutes busting this myth.

Well, I was laid off. But what sucks for me will be a win for the community as I'm working on Buffee again full-time, and progress has been … interesting. We're also really happy to see prices falling on some of the critical parts of our BOM, especially the main microprocessor. So how about a little "State of the Union Address?"

When Apple introduced PowerPC they also introduced the idea of system-level emulation providing a stop-gap for applications (and ROM) to remain as 68K code for a while. The emulator, written originally by Gary Davidian, introduced some novel features, but wasn't terribly fast – it was a later version made by Eric Traut that introduced us to the term "Dynamic Recompiler" which would become the forerunner of Just-In-Time (JIT) Compilers. It serves as one of only two emulators which use this model.