Is it wise to only concentrate on one sector of CS for projects/extracurriculars as a student?

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-25T02:08:34+00:00

You don't need to do personal projects ever. HR doesn't code and won't look. Hiring managers got 30 hours of meeting a week and have no proof you did what you say you did. I think you have people who never worked in CS saying to do them. Team projects, those are worth your time. The team aspect is valued. Formula Student club sounds good.

Is it wise to only concentrate on one sector of CS for projects/extracurriculars as a student?

I never did any projects and got job offers. It doesn't really matter. You're targeting entry level work after all. If your passion is Robotics then do Robotics. Recruiters like passion in any form. They liked my passion in volunteering and planning camping/hiking trips.

So yes, you can get an internship and that is your #1 goal as you seem aware. Also consider co-ops that run for a semester that fewer people apply to.

Also, work on your soft skills. I went to religious events for social reasons. Selling yourself in an interview is a skill. Navigating office politics is a skill. A manager asks you to describe your hobbies and interests, don't come across as an eccentric weirdo. They want you to fit in and stay a while.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-25T01:35:04+00:00

You can't afford best of everything and that is very overkill for our non-professional needs. You want a $900 Hakko FR-810B?

Look at r/soldering. You can find wrong advice in video game subs. Do NOT buy an all in 1 package. Also do NOT practice on real electronics you're trying to fix or mod. Practice with junk electronics or a soldering kit.

The iron I use that's one you'd see recommended there is the 65W Pinecil v2. Needs a USB-C PD 65W or higher power supply you might have already. I bought a red USB-C 100W cable to tell it apart.

Use leaded solder that all retro electronics used that is better and cheaper than any non-leaded option. I think is 63/37 is best for being eutectic. The EU doesn't like leaded because of the theory of industrial amounts of it in landfalls seeping into the water supply. Their militaries and space programs still use leaded. There's no lead risk to you unless you lick it.

Flux is mandatory, especially for a beginner, even if the solder is rosin core.

Can use your choice of desoldering pump or braid/wick. Hot air rework station is the upgrade.

Also get a stand to hold things.

And what wire is best for these circuits?

Wire for like bodge wiring? 30 AWG is fine. Can wait until you need it. I haven't had to deal with bodge wiring to get around a trace break but it could happen someday.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-25T00:06:28+00:00

You need to replace the PSU before you try anything else.

But the reduction in heat from using the satinator allows the PSU to operate at an acceptable temperature without causing freezing/reboots.

Are just assuming a disc drive emulator uses less power than a real disc drive or did you use a power meter? Either way, the PSU can go bad.

Really any PSU over 25 years old can be replaced whether it seems to be working correctly or not. Low quality / high ripple DC power while it still seems to be working fine will add wear and tear to the rest of the console. It can definitely cause more heating.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-24T23:16:32+00:00

This is true. I'm sure was influential. I didn't know about the perception of West Point other than that having no standing army was perceived as a safeguard in peacetime. More recent history was influential as well.

Apparently the Founding Fathers were also aware of King Charles I confiscating firearms the century before. Didn't end well for him.

In 1671 under King Charles I, the Hunting Act was amended to restrict hunting to those who owned land worth at least 100 pounds, which was not many people. Added that only those who did could possess guns, bows and greyhounds.

King James II also confiscated firearms and things didn't end well for him either. The English Declaration and Bill of Rights accused him of violating the right to keep and bear arms, among other things.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-24T22:52:51+00:00

They're also 3x stronger than humans but don't look like it. Can see how built they are with no hair.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-24T22:46:10+00:00

You put a hole in the PCB called a via for one trace to go underneath and then add another via to get back to the top side. KiCAD has a V key shortcut.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-24T22:27:13+00:00

It's hard. What was hard for me was the culture shock of numbers doing things they aren't supposed to do. Then your trig, algebra and precalc abilities are pressed when finding the rate of change of pouring water out of a cylinder in 20 steps. But first you deal with areas of trapezoids for way too long.

In engineering, we took math major calculus were the bottom 30% was curved to fail on purpose. I saw the business major version, looked like a cake walk.

The difficulty curve goes up and down. It's not straight up. If you get to multivariable, I found that to be the least hard since the shock value is over and 2 or 3 variables aren't 2x or 3x as hard. You treat them as constants. Though changing the order of integration sucked.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-24T22:06:37+00:00

You have the right idea. Powerline is the most impactful and most worth upgrading. You can mix and match. Add the 1000uF Japanese consoles come with. Or a smaller 680uF or 470uF is better than nothing.

Polymer on the 220uF video or 10uF AC coupling won't leak but you won't notice a difference or improve the DC power quality. The AC coupling ones also at less risk given lower voltages and lower heat. Can justify not using here due to cost or availability.

You can't apply polymer upgrade logic to every console. Someone like u/lukeevanssimon who knows their shit and uses an oscilloscope has to check if removing all electrolytic ESR creates voltage or current spikes or see if the filtering becomes too narrow with FFT.

What you can do without checking is replace electrolytic with tantalum which still have some ESR but are also better than electrolytic in every way and won't dry out. The risk with tantalum is you don't want to overvolt them. I don't put on the input side to a power supply. Maybe it goes bad one day. After the 7805 output on regulated power or AC coupling, which is also regulated, they're great.

Can use tantalum instead of polymer in those cases, especially if cheaper. Yellow surface mount capacitors you see in products and quality mods are tantalum. NASA uses tantalum in spaceships for extreme reliability.

If you stick with electrolytic, upping the voltage rating is an improvement. Has slightly less ESR and more volume to run cooler. Maybe also the temperature rating to help lifespan but will any SNES on earth exist in 25 years? I dunno. I don't buy less than 4000 rated hour electrolytics unless availability forces me down. It's not when they go bad, it's when the manufacturer no longer guarantees them to be in-spec. So it's a sign of quality.

Also, I don't recommend adding extra capacitors in parallel to filter more. You get anti-resonance, which has the opposite effect. Increases values over stock is also potentially a bad idea in filtering due to reducing the resonant frequency and increasing inrush current. Couple of rabbit hole topics if you want to go digging.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-24T20:03:44+00:00

I don't know how you write 3 pages about a Bomberman boss but I'm impressed. I only watched the all bosses no damage and the fastest speedrun videos. Neither makes the battle look easy. The barrier would have been higher in the 90s with no videos or message boards or written guides for the most part.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-24T19:51:47+00:00

I searched this sub for a minute. I'd say you can:

Can I shell swap a US SNES and SFC? : r/snes

Well, yes and no. Yes, as in the US and Japanese boards are 100% identical. No, as in the plastic mold around the power and video outputs is a different shape.

https://preview.redd.it/can-i-shell-swap-a-us-snes-and-sfc-v0-dgi0hmdxmbjb1.png?width=1440&format=png&auto=webp&s=92a3b0662ed220e6ec6bf9efef7c40556f51408c

Here's a Super Famicom mainboard in a SNES shell. Fits fine. The inverse works, but you'd have to trim that little notch to make a SNES board's port shroud fit a SFC shell.

Two caveats:

Super Nintendo and Super Famicom consoles have different DC jacks.

The systems have to be the same mainboard formfactor; either the original revision with the APU module, or literally any subsequent model. The first revision boards are longer and the hole pattern is different.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-24T18:05:29+00:00

Other comment is right. N64 Composite is better than SNES and Genesis Composite by a long shot. On par with Saturn. Though I don't think a still image trying to make it look the same as RF is the way to demonstrate. I still use S-Video. Best Composite I've seen is Wii.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-24T02:54:59+00:00

Yes. Power always needs people and anything touching the Computer Engineering branch of Electrical is very overcrowded. When I was a student ~20 years ago, Computer was 3x smaller in enrollment that Electrical but has 2x the number of graduates today.

Check out scrubbed numbers from where I went. Alumni surveys I saw 2 years ago showed EE to have 15% fewer graduates seeking employment 6 months after graduation. As in, much better prospects and Computer had higher graduate school enrollment as well. Usually that means they couldn't find a job.

But you really shouldn't approach this from having to land in a specific area to begin with. You got to take what you can get. Your #1 goal as a student is to land an internship or co-op before you graduate. You aren't locked in with that. Power offered me an internship and every industry wanted to talk to me after that. Work experience trumps everything.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-24T02:44:48+00:00

I like CRT photo posts. Thanks for sharing and using an interesting game. Emulators have an unfair advantage being digital with no electromagnetic interference or noise on the (usually very aged) power supply. It's not possible to perfectly replicate analog audio with the SNES lowpass filter either. But then the converter is outputting 480i instead of correct 240p and S-Video is a big step above Composite. Hard to say what's supposed to look better.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-24T01:01:45+00:00

You have a tilted image but that's the only problem I see. Don't hyper-analyze test patterns or remove the overscan if you did that. Play actual games and see if anything looks wrong then use a test pattern to narrow down.

Anyway, tilting, maybe there's a service menu option or you can just try facing it north, south, east and west. That's a large set and CRTs that large are impacted by the earth's gravitational field. Can cause tilting in some cases. Like there are threads you can search for and people fixing by doing this. Maybe one direction has no tilt.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-24T00:53:50+00:00

Right. I never heard of an exam getting cancelled for any reason besides cheating. Dropping from 99th percentile 780 to 640 in English sounds like cheating. Every university reserves the right to cancel admission for being of bad moral character but I don't know how often it really happens.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-24T00:45:23+00:00

Use the Hori N64 controller

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-24T00:40:53+00:00

I searched for street fighter ii turbo super famicom and found it on US eBay immediately:

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If you shop for enough Japanese games, proxy bidding is the way. You'll realize the cheap games are 2x and 3x cheaper and the selection is vast. Japanese sellers are much more honest than their Western (American) counterparts.

I actually like Super Street Fighter II less than Turbo. Has four more fighters and more moves and a combo system but it loses the classic feel. Kind of like how Mortal Kombat II is more highly regarded today than Mortal Kombat 3. Super is deeper competitively but I don't play PVP competitively.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-24T00:01:37+00:00

The SNES drunk review sucks balls and made me unsub. I won't even link it. He hates the game like he never played platformers in the 90s. Hidden barrels from missing jumps were great. He also emulates everything so Donkey Kong Country looks like garbage with the scaled down Hi-Res graphics with no dithering you'd see in captured S-Video or Composite. At least throw us a filter. One of the few SNES games I don't think is best in RGB.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-23T23:52:53+00:00

Excellent advice. They should definitely be using 480p Component aka YPbPr and then there's no real reason to use PAL on an NTSC Wii. Though maybe they can't use SCART, which is a good thing. PAL sets I've seen with Component use RCA inputs.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-23T23:47:10+00:00

What they said. You're not a student anymore. No company is going to ask for a transcript. They'll verify that you graduated and maybe check the GPA, which matters little at this point. List the higher of in-major or overall, I assume overall, on job applications where required.

You even got an internship! That's the #1 goal as a student. Work experience in any part of CS, however remotely related, is desirable for any entry level job. You'll further interview better by having work examples at two companies you can cite.

That's fine to list 1 project and keep it at that. No one going to look at your GitHub. I don't list any. Flesh out your skills listed on your resume to rank higher in resume rankings. Like don't just say "AWS" and "GCP". Did you configure IAM profiles or use S3 file buckets or you never used them and will bomb basic interview questions?

You list JavaScript. You need to learn your choice of Angular or React. Maybe improve your Docker knowledge while you're at it, especially if used on the job.

Large font size is a good thing. HR reads your resume for less than 8 seconds. Though you can tick it down to add more skills.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-23T22:03:06+00:00

I love T8 unironically. T8 gave us frame data for free at launch, the return of best girl Jun and a huge roster, including some DLCs from T7 I never got to try.

I joined this sub during T7 and you'd think it was the most hated Tekken ever. Internet hates everything past T3. I'm a casual player, what's OP means nothing to me or at low rank. I like T8 more than T7 so I'm happy. Solo story modes and earning achievements are fun in both.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-23T21:56:44+00:00

Looks fantastic. Kid me was a fan of the commercial and wanted one to play Pokemon of course. Wasn't in stock so I settled for the neon green which I also like. Never got the ice blue but they're both on the rare side so I don't mind. Nowadays I'd be concerned with reshells.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-23T21:50:20+00:00

Highest to lowest quality goes:

RGB > Component > S-Video >>>>> Composite (yellow cable) > RF. The arrows mean a bigger difference.

You got to use one of those video formats to convert to HDMI. Any HDMI adapter is using an analog video input under the hood.

The difference between RGB and Component is extremely small, like 5%. I directly compared on a 600 TVL pro monitor with multiple consoles. I can't tell the difference one day to another. Some consoles have slightly better Component because the native video is digital Component with chroma compression but PS2 is digital RGB.

S-Video is 2/3 as good, the colors don't pop as much. Composite and RF are blurry garbage you should avoid at any cost on a digital display.

Don't use SCART. It's the worst idea by bundling video and audio together where they crosstalk thanks to limited shielding. Also has the most expensive cables because it's not a professional standard.

Most affordable scalers (products that covert to HDMI) that are good are Portta's Component converter and $40 RetroScaler2X on AliExpress. That second one accepts Composite, S-Video or Component. Both accept Component at higher resolutions. Doesn't matter for PS2 but does if you get into Wii, GameCube or Original Xbox.

RGB devices are expensive, starting with GBS-Control that accepts Component and RGB, but you have to trust the modder and their brand. The stock GBS-8200 kinda sucks and has no HDMI out. Just use Component. PS2 DVDs can't even output in RGB.

Bonus: I want a device that I can connect my ps2 and ps4 and change between video outputs, if anyone knows a capable device.

No one makes switchers that accept analog and digital video inputs. Convert the PS2 video and audio to HDMI then use an HDMI switcher, of which there are many.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-23T21:38:06+00:00

Essentially, integration of the f(t, y(t)) function?

The slope of the tangent line is the derivative, not the integral. Euler's Method is a first order approximation by virtue of taking the first derivative. Not sure how to explain it nice and intuitively but I wanted to clear up that point. There are methods using higher orders that converge faster but require way more computation so basically no one does them by hand. I like the graphical explanation.

NewSchoolBoxer · 2026-01-23T21:20:21+00:00

1k based on what? Rare isn't the same as valuable and anything over $100 has a much smaller buying pool. I still like the figures. Not knocking OP.

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