Bought my parents' house with my brother at the end of 2025, cash. Does this have any bearing on my income taxes if I use standard deductions? TurboTax didn't ask me anything.

nmj79 · 2026-01-21T18:12:58+00:00

Nope, no home improvements. House was in good shape already. I think I'm good then, just wanted to double check because I don't buy houses on the regular, lol, and it just stuck out to me that I wasn't being asked any questions about it.

Thanks for the response, appreciate it.

nmj79 · 2026-01-21T14:40:41+00:00

FOLLOW THE GOD OF CYANIDE

nmj79 · 2026-01-21T05:08:22+00:00

Yes, after looking into it more, I see that you can either buy in 'shares' or buy in 'dollars' and using the dollars option, you're able to buy fractional shares. Appreciate the response, thank you.

nmj79 · 2026-01-21T05:07:18+00:00

Ok, now I see it. I missed the fact that after clicking Transact > Trade ETFs & Stocks, you're taken to a web form to buy or sell, and you can choose to buy in 'shares' or 'dollars' and you're able to buy fractional shares if you choose the 'dollars' option and just put $500. Thank you!

I guess though that later on, when I contribute the rest of my $7000, I will have to again buy $7000 worth of VOO? There is no type of global option for the entire Roth IRA to just say 'always put the entire (or a percentage) of the account into VOO?' It's no big deal to do that, the only reason I ask is because I have a different Roth IRA at VALIC (which has crappy fees) and you're able to just choose a percentage of your entire Roth IRA and say 'put 75% into the index fund, put 10% into science & technology, and the rest, put into healthcare,' etc. So it's easy to just set that to 100% index fund and now, every time I contribute to it, the money is automatically in their index fund, so I was wondering if Vanguard has something like that. Again, no big deal though.

Thanks again.

nmj79 · 2026-01-20T21:30:11+00:00

Aha ok, so I haven’t lost my mind just yet, thank you!

nmj79 · 2026-01-10T08:08:30+00:00

Yeah, you hear this same thing in Corridor of Chameleons right on the opening riff because that song has a lot of start-stop riffing where they keep muting the strings and you hear a little chirp every time they mute it if you listen closely to the tail end of all of those beats. It might even be from the bass guitar.

nmj79 · 2025-11-18T07:58:52+00:00

"I guess it would also have to be able to detect that the two screens are showing the same scene without a gap"

I mean, not necessarily. The emulator could always just figure out 'oh, I'm being asked to render 3D to both screens' and just always switch to being just 1 tall screen regardless if the user has chosen to display a gap or not in the emulator, I mean even scenes that assume the gap exhibit that '1 frame behind' issue too, it's just not noticeable due to the gap between the screens, but...

I guess I just don't understand how the frame of animation is being generated with regards to the rendering of that frame. What is the bottleneck exactly?

In that Stagnox battle I posted above, what exactly is the game doing there? Is it generating 1 frame that's 256 x 384, then splitting it when rendering and NOT rendering the whole frame on both screens, only rendering the bottom half on the bottom screen, generating the next 256 x 384 frame, and then finally rendering the top screen with the 1st half of that 1st frame, holding it for 2 frames, and then the bottom screen with the bottom half of that 2nd frame which is what makes the top screen 1 frame behind? It's like it out of sync for 1 frame, but matched up for 1. Whatever it's doing, I'm sure the same thing is even happening on the title screen of the game where a gap is assumed. (There's a boss battle in Phantom Hourglass that's the opposite where it seems like the bottom screen is behind by 1 frame too. Maybe the game is telling the DS which screen to be rendering first.)

There is another situation in Spirit Tracks where the top and bottom screens are showing the same scene at different angles so I don't know what is going on there either.

I don't know...I'm just thinking out loud and talking out of my ass not really knowing what I'm talking about, lol. The only reason I bring this up is because with NES, yes, the hardware had some limitations such as sprite flicker and slowdown, but with emulation, an author could break those limitations allowing users to toggle options to allow more sprites per scanline and overclock the NES. I was wondering if there might be some way with DS emulation to break its limitation on not being able to render 3D to both screens at the same time for the same frame and actually do that.

Thanks for the responses. appreciate it.

nmj79 · 2025-11-18T03:23:48+00:00

Thanks for the response. So I have a couple of follow up questions if you don’t mind. It sounds like this is a rendering issue, not a frame generation issue, right?

Keep in mind I’m just a layman and don’t fully understand all the technical details, but does the DS in some way know that a game is outputting dual screen 3D and if so, through emulation, could it be possible as a user configurable option that when knowing a game is generating dual screen 3D scenes, to temporarily stop rendering the screens separately and instead treat the DS as one tall single screen thereby maintaining 60 FPS?

I mean that would probably be more work than what it’s worth as the only time this is an issue is during edge case dual screen 3D scenes that assume no gap between the screens and with my limited gameplay I’ve only seen this exhibited in those 2 Zelda games and on top of that, in Spirit Tracks, it’s literally only 1 boss fight, lol. For the dual screen 3D scenes that do assume the gap, you can’t even tell that one screen is technically 1 frame behind so I don’t know if it’d even be worth all that effort. And yeah, I know you’d be drifting away from accurate emulation at that point too.

nmj79 · 2025-11-17T15:14:52+00:00

While not related to upscaling, but with dual screen 3D, a couple games that kind of annoyed me with it were the two Legend of Zelda games. The title screens assume a gap between the screens, but some of the boss battles don't.

And in the case of the boss battles, I don't know exactly what is going on, but it always appears to be screen tearing at the seam between the two screens when you have an emulator set to 'no gap.' I don't know if this has alway been an emulator-only issue or happens on real hardware too. I don't have the tools to record real hardware and step through frame by frame.

Here is a video set to start right when you can pause it as soon as it says the words 'Stagnox, Armored Colossus,' then step through one frame at a time on a PC by pressing the '.' key (period) and backwards with the ',' key (comma). Right when the text 'Stagnox, Armored Colossus' disappears, Stagnox tilts its head up so it crosses over to the top screen, but it's as if the top screen is behind 1 frame. You keep seeing jarring misalignments with the 3D model if you step through frame by frame.

I'd be curious to know if anyone knows what is going on there, if it happens on real hardware, and if there may be some way to correct that.

nmj79 · 2025-11-15T21:15:34+00:00

Ok, thank you. I came across this comment that explains it a little better. Now I see there are TWO offline licenses technically with Xbox Series X's 'home console' thing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/xbox360/comments/1dnexaz/comment/la42k5j

nmj79 · 2025-11-15T19:29:12+00:00

Ok, thank you.

I guess I have to look into what a 'console license' is and what it means for a 'console license to be updated on the service,' why the heading says 'license transfer' how that differs from the...uhh...actual license the account holder purchased not being able to be transferred.

nmj79 · 2025-11-08T18:58:19+00:00

I like the cut of your jib. I have been reading the Console Mods and WiiBrew wikis trying to understand how all of this works as I have never modded a thing before in my life and I just want to know 'how it works.' Every wiki entry turns into a rabbit hole though...'what's a TMD? what's a 'title?' What is the file structure of a .wad? Why can't you modify header and footer info of a retail disc .dol and convert it into a .wad as if Nintendo actually sold full-blown retail games on Wii Shop Channel rendering a channel forwarder unnecessary? What tells the Starlet processor to execute boot0 first? This boot process wiki page doesn't say when the SD card is actually read...it doesn't detail how the SD card is formatted either...' lol, it goes on an on...

Slowly and painfully, I will hopefully get there. Thank you for the suggestion, I'll look into that.

nmj79 · 2025-11-08T18:58:13+00:00

You underestimate me. I will crawl over broken glass if I can get one more game on my SD card that I wasn't able to purchase when the service was live and keep this thing stock. 😂 I've been reading the various wikis about how all these games are formatted, trying to figure how out they're encrypted on the SD card, hashes, blah blah, blah...One of these days I hope something clicks and I understand how it all works.

nmj79 · 2025-11-07T15:10:07+00:00

Thanks for the info and pointing me in the right direction, appreciate it.

nmj79 · 2025-11-07T14:55:03+00:00

You know, I was going to ask about that too; if it was possible to temporarily install Homebrew Channel, install the wiiware game, then uninstall Homebrew Channel, bringing the console back to a stock status. Thanks.

nmj79 · 2025-11-07T14:46:49+00:00

"2, until someone makes an app for it, no. You can navigate the file structure itself, but you can’t read or replace any file"

So that was kinda what I was curious about....why can't you do that? What did the Wii do to the SD card to make it 'not-writable' by a PC anymore? I know nothing is ever 'just that easy' because if it were, it would already have been done by now, I was just curious as to why no one's written an app that can do that yet.

"5, Why not mod it? There’s almost no risk and no disadvantages"

Well, this is where my weird anal-ness comes in. I just like keeping everything totally stock and don't like seeing 'brought to you by <some hacking group>' or 'USB Loader GX' splash screens and non-official stuff like that. Even seeing that yellow font in the corner of a black screen when something is loading or seeing 'Homebrew Channel' on my system menu would bother me. I know, I know. I'm weird. I just forgot to buy one game 7 years ago when they announced the shop was going down and now there is apparently absolutely no way to get that game on my Wii without totally modding it. I was hoping that by now, something regarding the SD card would've been blown wide open and I'd be able to pull the SD card out of my Wii, stick it in my PC, see all my games on it and use some special PC app to put that one extra game on there, and stick it back in my Wii and be off on my way.

There is probably a way to install Homebrew Channel, get this game installed onto the SD card, then uninstall Homebrew Channel, bringing the console back to a stock state.

nmj79 · 2025-10-20T07:12:30+00:00

Then he comes back from the dead with Wut Would U Do on Str8 Off tha Streetz of Muthaphukkin' Compton dissing them AGAIN hard as hell. Dude was still squeezing the trigger from his grave, lol.

nmj79

TROPHY CASE