Mainline Album #7. This is it. One more album. One last release of songs, or is it? Every single year I've been in University (undergraduate & graduate), I've made it my goal to compose and release an album. This one is my seventh album, with a little bit of the same as before, but with a bit more effort put into instrumentation. All of this, with a criminally unfitting album art. I hope you enjoy. It took me 5 years to compose this album, from 2020 until 2024.

This is also the first time in a mainline release that I go hi-res. The release is in 96 kHz / 24-bit via Bandcamp, and 96 kHz / 32-bit float via MEGA. The MEGA download also has album art and back art as PNGs at the original 4096x4096 resolution. Album art was shot on a Canon EOS Rebel T8i.

Font is "Parisienne".

To start, I'm quite pissed off. Sometimes I just want to record some audio from multiple devices in sync, losslessly. There's quite a few purposes for this. In my case it's gameplay with microphones and Discord audio all separate but in sync. Back then, software like Dxtory had the functionality to record multiple audio tracks in perfect sync. But it requires a game open, and it doesn't work with modern games. In fact, it struggles with Windows 11. There are other solutions, like OBS. But, again these include a video track. What if I just want the audio in perfect sync?

GeForce Experience provides minor multitrack support. But it does it with AAC and only allows one additional track. Its options are very limited, to the point I complain about it in "Grind Series: Quantity without compromising Quality". Audacity was called a "Multitrack recorder" at one point. But ironically to the name, it doesn't support recording from multiple sources in sync either. But what powers it definitely can: FFmpeg. So let's take a dive into how to record multiple audio tracks on Windows in perfect sync.

I had something in mind for my library of gameplay footage, at least in the past few years. Why not give users the option to visually see inputs? Not only am I curious about my own inputs sometimes (especially in a rhythm game or FPS), but it could also be quite satisfying to see keys light up alongside the video. It's something extra. But it's cool.

It does have some practical use though. When I was teaching online due to COVID, I did something like this to help students see what I was doing in VIM and TMUX. Here's what I mean:

I'll be brief on this post. MWIII requires a prior launch of MWII to run. Since these games are coded specifically to not run via clicking their EXE files, a few extra steps are taken to force execution. I'll provide two ways: an automated batch file, and a manual way if you don't trust me. 😉

This is for the Steam version of the game. And it relies on a steam.exe to boot up the game in the end. Given this blog post was written before the final release of the game came out, I may have to edit it to account for multiplayer layer on.

Recently, I wanted to record some Nintendo Switch gameplay. Since the built-in 720p recording feature is garbage for anything other than immediate highlights, I figured I'd sink some money into a device that can capture a full 1080p feed and record it.

I looked at some options. A close friend of mine uses an Elgato HD60 S+ to record gameplay and stream it over Discord. So it was an appealing choice after seeing it in action. But I wanted to future-proof myself. So I decided to get the Elgato 4K60 S+. The appeal here is that it can act like the HD60 S+, but can handle 4K HDR. It also is capable of operating on its own via recording to an SD card. This makes it a very convenient choice if you want to record something without having a PC around. Also, I don't have a free PCIe slot for some of the other choices Elgato offers.

Well, I didn't really intend on this being 3 parts, but here we are. So if you haven't read the previous parts, you probably should. Here are some links:

• Part 1 - White Screen Brick Recovery
• Part 2 - Firmware Flashing

Following Part 2, I went from having a frozen white screen "brick" of an Action Replay DS cartridge to having a working cartridge, just like how things were in 2007. I now have full access to working hardware. And I am able to flash any kind of firmware I want onto a physical ARDS cartridge utilising a trick with CFW. So I think it's now time to go and finish off the remaining research on how the thing works.

In Part 1, a lot of the recovery steps taken were based on guesses and looking at bytes in a hex editor. While I'm sure a lot of that research and guessing was correct (as I was able to recover all of my old codes), it would be nice to simplify it all down and organise it. Documentation, I guess. So, where do we start?

Following Part 1, I felt like the research done was sufficient. And it really was. I was able to recover the data from my Action Replay DS by dumping the cartridge and taking a look at what's inside. I even wrote programs to aid in extracting the data. So what's next?

I just feel like we can do better than that. It didn't sit well with me that I was restricted by a means of not being able to test this with hardware, because I was missing some pieces of the puzzle. But I want this story to have a proper ending, so it's time to fix that cartridge and get it working again. Once it's working, testing it and getting accurate data for documentation and archival purposes sounds like a great next step. Also, I would like to figure out what actually went wrong with my cartridge which started this series of blog posts. So, let's jump in.

In 2007, I got a hold of an Action Replay DS cartridge. As a kid, I used it not only to cheat, but to experiment and play around with games I had physical copies of. Don't worry. I didn't cheat online. Aside from them wiping out my saves, it was a pretty fun time. The way the cartridge worked was cool. It had an additional NDS cartridge slot on top. You would put your game in there. Apply the cheats in the interface that boots up, and then boot the game. The cheats will be applied and you can play the game normally.

Unfortunately, a few years after owning one, I managed to make that cartridge unusable. I have no idea how it actually happened. When I boot it, I am presented with a white screen and nothing else. On top of that, I don't have the cable that would let me connect the cartridge to my PC. So I am kind of out of luck, right? Well, not really. Let's look into it.

Just a disclaimer, this blog post was typed progressively. I type as I figure out more things. So it won't just be a "this is this" and "that is that". So it might come across as disorganised. My apologies. But I do think it might be useful to some people to see how I come to some of the conclusions I do. And you see the journey I went across. It's a fun challenge to me. So know what you're getting into by reading this. My goals are to figure out how to salvage whatever data I could off the cartridge, and then figure out why the Action Replay DS froze in the first place.

Since 2020, I got into HDR10 video production. I got an HDR10 monitor and started playing games and even recording them in HDR10. It's nice. But I've been wondering, if I can record videos in HDR10, why not take HDR10 images?

Well, turns out, images in true HDR10 hasn't been looked into a lot until recently. Formats like JPG and PNG do support higher bit depths than 8bpc (bits per channel). The idea is there for at least storing the colour information. But what about the HDR10 metadata? How will the monitor know how to calibrate the content to the monitor? Maybe HEIC can store the metadata just like HEVC in a video container? Let's look into it a little.

I used to be an iPhone user back in the days of the iPhone 4S. Back in those days, I would jailbreak my phone, which gave me full file system access. Backing up my device was very simple, without even needing iTunes. Since then, I've moved to Android. I've just used microSD cards to store everything, as well as have a script to run rsync to copy my data to my personal server. It's nice. But that's just my own backup solution.

I thought I never had to deal with iPhones again. Not like they were a problem. I just enjoy Android much more. The rest of my family uses iPhone. Yes, in our family group chat, I'm the sole reason they have green text message bubbles instead of blue. It's funny. Well, now that the iPhone 13 is out, they are upgrading to that and want to have their data backed up.

Side note, this is a bit more of a rant or silly story than an actual post. It's almost straight from my diary. It'll be shorter than a usual post, and more dramatic. Gotta make it fun somehow.