Personal Life on PatchSalts.com

October 2026 Brief Update

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:51:24 -0400

Hey everyone, just thought I’d give a brief update. Around the same time I started working on the retro shader stuff, I started getting full-day headaches every day. It’s been about 2 weeks of this and it’s made most tasks somewhat difficult. I had to take it easy and try to micro-manage my health since relatively few things would make it better and many things would make it worse. Today has been the first day in a while my brain has felt kinda normal since the headaches started.

Despite that, I’m still intent on working on shader stuff if possible, since it has been fun. I’d like to be able to use mGBA to emulate Super Game Boy games as if I was playing them on a CRT screen. You see, the Super Game Boy is a Super Nintendo add-on that allowed gamers to play their Game Boy games oon their SNES, with a couple of features (like specialized palettes and borders) added. I have the analog video filter for it basically ported over (it’s Themaister’s NTSC-256px-Composite shader), but there’s a few small problems.

mGBA always renders shader passes to an integer framebuffer

The shader I’m porting uses 2 passes. The first basically processes input RGB pixels and renders the corresponding analog signal values to a cache, and the second pass reads the cache, does some more processing to simulate the analog signal characteristics, and renders the result back into RGB pixels. When the first pass is rendered to an integer framebuffer, some information is lost, and the output pixels look very magenta-ish instead of their intended colors.
mGBA doesn’t pass information about frame count/time to shaders

The shader I’m porting uses information about the number of frames being rendered to simulate signal jitter. mGBA currently doesn’t pass any of that info to its shaders, so this effect can’t be simulated yet.
mGBA doesn’t have any aspect ratio correction features

As stated in my last post, video output from older consoles like the SNES were almost always stretched horizontally a little bit, but currently mGBA provides no way to simulate this characteristic… after all it’s technically not an SNES emulator, it’s a Game Boy (Color/Advance) emulator. (Although I remember reading that sometimes a bit of SNES emulation is needed to get the SGB features working, so the lines are blurred there.)

I’m currently doing work on the first point, and I plan on submitting a pull request to get the feature implemented in mainstream mGBA. After that, I’ll also work on the next 2 points. I expect the next few posts might still be focusing on that for a while :P

It is important to remember that while there is no right way to play an older game these days, I simply don’t want everyone to forget what the original look and feel was. “Sonic was an ugly game because the checkerboard patterns hurt my eyes” shouldn’t be the takeaway people have after playing it on a modern system, ignorant that you probably weren’t supposed to be seeing the checkerboard patterns at all (again, see the previous blog post for info about the blending of dithered patterns). I would prefer to simulate the full SNES experience when playing a game in SGB mode, and I’d like to enable that experience for myself and others, but the lines are especially blurred in this case since those are technically still Game Boy games. I wouldn’t blame anyone for playing games in SGB mode with no video filters or correction at all, since it could be argued that they simply want to play the Game Boy game and the added features are just a nice bonus.

Thank you so much for reading, have a nice day.

– Patch

Introducing Desktop Scrollery

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:21:40 -0400

Hello again! Today I’d like to introduce Desktop Scrollery. You can scatter papers all over a physical desktop and shift your gaze to whichever one you want to read. You can try to do this on a computer’s virtual desktop, but you’ll find it’s rather easy to run out of space. Your screen is usually not big enough. I’ve always thought it might be fun to try and complete the skeuomorphism. I’m building a tool that allows you to scroll your windows across your computer’s virtual desktop space to give the sense of moving spatially between windows rather than constantly alt-tabbing to raise windows over currently visible ones. Please note that I’m developing it as a KWin script, meaning it’s only available for KDE Plasma users (so as far as I know, no Mac/Windows support, sorry). Currently, the plan is to slide windows over when your mouse cursor touches the edges of the screen. Here’s a demo of the current functionality.

Your browser doesn't support HTML5 video. Here is a link to the video instead.

… As you may be able to see, it’s kinda iffy right now. The windows are supposed to slide over in both axes, not resize only vertically. I’m not comfortable putting it in the main branch yet, so to test drive it yourself you’d have to use the basic-functionality branch. You can check it out on the GitHub repository.

A little history on the development process

This is an idea I’ve had for a very long time. I’ve even tried to implement it before, but I ran into some issues between the gap in the documentation and my current knowledge on the subject.

There are some documentation pages for KWin scripting available, but every time I read them I feel like I’m missing something. For example, there’s an official “KWin scripting tutorial” page, and it provides plenty of useful info, but also omits plenty of crucial info. It describes how a KWin script project is packaged using the KPackage format, but it doesn’t actually describe how to package your script, and the KPackage link they provide doesn’t explain either, instead seeming to cover building KPackage save/load support into full-blown desktop programs. My confusion every time I opened the docs is a huge reason the project has never made it out of the ideation phase before.

This time I decided to just get something done, no matter what it takes me to do it. I went in search of some external examples and resources, and I found an example script to inspire me, Sticky Window Snapping by FLUPP. It’s really easy to follow along if I see how someone else did it. It turns out the package format is really just zipping your project and changing the extension from .zip to .kwinscript. Unbelievable… Brilliant… Look, I understand that this kind of information is probably in the docs somewhere, but when the page is titled “KWin scripting tutorial” I feel like including that information directly on the page would be pretty helpful. Perhaps I should figure out how to contribute to the page just to fix it so the project benefits from my confusion.

Being a sore loser aside, I have been able to test that my project is somewhat functional, so that’s pretty neat. I’m finding myself dreading opening it to continue working on it… This is the furthest I’ve ever gotten with the project, so I think I’m gonna take a rest on it for now and switch to a different project before I burn out too much.

Personal stuff since my last post

Touhou 6’s remaster and rebuild being available on Steam has been a total blast, I didn’t quite realize how much I missed playing these games. For the unaware (most of my audience haha), the Touhou Project is a series of Japanese bullet hell games that draw heavy inspiration from classic arcade shooters like Galaga, 1942, DoDonPachi, etc. The player dodges waves of enemy fire while progressing through the (cheesy) plot. Completing a full playthrough only takes around 30 minutes. They’re difficult, but the difficulty is secondary to the weird and classic vibes. I’m really grateful for a way to easily run the game again, it’s a bit tricky to get the old version running nicely on modern computer systems.

I watched Coyote vs. ACME last weekend with some friends, it was a blast. I didn’t really grow up watching much Looney Tunes, but I had a basic level of familiarity. There were several jokes that I didn’t really understand but they were few and far between. The basic pacing of the humor was extremely pleasant and engaging.

I’m excited for the new changes being brought into Overwatch soon, Doctrine looks like a super fun character and I’m excited for the day he’ll be added to the game in full.

Apparently I’m super susceptible to pressure fluctuations. I was feeling totally crummy yesterday, waking up with a headache and fatigue, which stayed with me all day. Checking the air quality monitor revealed that from the 19th to the 21st, the air pressure went from 1011 hPa to 1001 hPa and back up to 1011 hPa. Yippee. I guess it’s a relief to know that something did this to me rather than some sort of mysterious wind.

Thank you so much for reading, have a nice day.

– Patch

Hello, blog!

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 14:24:14 -0400

Hi! It’s Patch. After a some R&D, I’m finally live with my blog! If you’re unfamiliar with me (or if you just want to read more of my lovely words), please be sure to check out the About page. I want to take a moment to outline my current goals with this blog.

The idea that I might want a blog isn’t exactly new for me, but very recently I realized I could kill two birds with one stone – nay, three. Possibly more birds. Although I feel a little bad for the birds.

It can help me talk to people about my personal life.

Whenever people ask me about how I’ve been, I tend to clam up or not be able to remember what I’ve been doing. My daily life doesn’t typically involve stopping to talk to people about things. It can really get in the way of talking to friends and family. Regularly writing here may keep me from clamming up so much. Hell, it may even provide me a way to explain things to people in a more digestible medium than blabbering and gesturing into the air.
It can help me persevere on projects.

A few months ago, I received my Pebble smart watch. I wanted it to last a long time, so I wanted to make a 3D-printed protective case for it. I didn’t quite love all the ones I was seeing online, so I decided to try designing one myself. After all, Core Devices published some of the watch’s CAD files online. I spent a week or 2 learning some 3D modeling and CAD skills in Blender and OnShape, but things weren’t so easy and I put the project on hold. I printed someone else’s design in the meantime. I felt like a failure for not being able finish the project, having nothing to show for all that effort, but the reality is that I learned some cool and fun things. Maybe producing project write-ups can serve as a bookmark, allowing me to register my progress/learning and make it easier to return later.
It can help me divert my focus from social media and group chats.

This one’s been brewing for a litte bit but it only recently came to a boiling point. Historically I’ve been a little too reliant on platforms like YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, and Discord for passing the time. Eventually I noticed this and started paring back a little bit. That solved the overuse problem but left another in its wake. Lately I’ve been finding that I get hurt very frequently in the environments that these platforms can create. Even after I had carefully curated my experiences on these sites, I still found myself reading very unpleasant things that would leave me upset for hours, sometimes even obsessing and ruminating over into the next day. Even limiting the kinds of things I see to just my friends’ posts, there are still too many ways for hurtful things to sneak in.

I think this means I’m not really compatible with a large part of the internet. Almost a month ago, I decided to start stepping back from those spaces entirely. I’m trying to essentially limit myself to directly getting the information I need and directly talking with my friends. It’s left me with a lot more time on my hands for focusing on the important things in life – personal growth, pursuing passions, stuff like that. Ironically, it’s allowed me to focus on starting this blog in the first place.

There are a couple more reasons bouncing around in my head, but these 3 are the basic ones. I think this post is already a good size, so there’s no need for me to stick around enumerating every possibility.

Going forward, I’d like to write about my projects, and maybe a little bit about neat things that I’ve noticed, or things I’m looking forward to (like how yesterday Touhou 6’s remaster launched, or how yesterday Nintendo announced a new Kirby and a new Metroid game). I don’t have a schedule in mind, but I expect writing on a weekly-ish basis will feel pretty natural. Things will probably evolve over time though.

Thank you so much for reading, have a nice day.

– Patch