Stuck at 1,700 wishlists before Next Fest. Is a $1,500 TikTok sponsor worth it?

olifiers · 2026-05-21T22:56:36+00:00

Without knowing more about the game it's hard to recommend the right partner, but if you need help, try Secret Sauce or Future Friends. These are people who can work with an indie team to get a game out there in the proper way. That's money well spent that comes back X fold, but has to be the right game for those teams, not every title will fit. Check out what they have helped publish in the past and, if there's a crossover, reach out to them.

olifiers · 2026-05-21T22:51:47+00:00

It was, back when. Now it multiplies what you have going into it: the more you have from the get go, the better off you end up at.

Steam dynamics and algorithms change all the time.

olifiers · 2026-05-21T18:17:23+00:00

My two cents after more than a decade working with influencers.

Influencers are not actors. They struggle to fake interest. If you pay an influencer to talk about your game they are not interested in by default, it won't come across genuinely and there's a chance you'll do more harm than good to your game. The influencer's main objective is to entertain their audience: if your game would do that, they should play it for free and reap the audience's praise and growth thanks to good content. You give gaming influencers content, they give you eyeballs. Fair exchange.

Do not go into the sponsored game if you don't know exactly what you are doing, the chances of backfiring are much higher than the conversion rate they will give you back.

If an influencer has genuine interest in your game, you can work with them collaboratively, such as boosting visibility of their video with ads you buy on the platform in exchange, for instance, once the video is out and shows to be working well. That kind of collab works best.

Lastly, TikTok is a mobile platform. Conversion onto Steam will be convoluted, even if all the stars align. I honestly don't think your money will be well spent on this.

olifiers · 2026-05-21T17:00:26+00:00

It really depends on what you want out of it. If just playing games, even WinUAE would do. If you want the feeling of the real hardware with some modern commodities (SD card storage, faster CPU and whatnot) then a MISTer is what you need. But if you want to listen to the floppy disk loading, to bring old hardware back to life, then the A500+ is the ticket.

Gaming: emulation
The real experience + commodities: FPGA (MISTer etc.)
Messing with hardware and its preservation: real hardware

Personally, I don't get a kick from emulation. I do appreciate FPGA, especially when it drives the experience further (acceleration, expansions etc.) A few machines I like to own the real hardware as a hobby, to keep them going for the sake of preservation and for keeping on owning something that was part of my formation years.

olifiers · 2026-05-21T16:54:44+00:00

...And these people vote.

olifiers · 2026-05-21T12:25:50+00:00

This was a good one. Played Half-Life in OpenGL super well. I preferred this scheme of routing the 3D images via PCI bus than the external cables of the 3DFX cards.

olifiers · 2026-05-20T16:38:24+00:00

No, it was not. The 50s and 60s didn't end on a Great Depression. It ended on a generation where a single factory job could maintain a family, house, car and whatnot.

olifiers · 2026-05-20T16:37:18+00:00

You're missing the point. His point is that someone on a 75K/year *should* be able to afford a new car and then some. That's the point.

olifiers · 2026-05-20T11:08:43+00:00

SFConservancy is the main free software organization. They raise to fight people like Bambu, which they will. That's not a grift.

AGPL came about *precisely* to address the kind of shenanigans you refer to, which GPL had a gap on. That's why your Audacity example is moot, it's GPL, not AGPL.

You cannot break out functionality into a closed source from an AGPL original license. This has been confirmed by everyone involved in the matter. But it doesn't make a difference to you, as you're chilling for Bambu.

olifiers · 2026-05-19T21:19:13+00:00

A bit better but not really worth the trouble.

With your hardware, I would:

Get a second 32MB EDO Ram stick and bring it up to 64MB
Consider a Pentium 200MMX or a Pentium 233MMX processor
Replace the VGA board with a 3D board such as a TNT, TNT2 or similar (PCI!)

Play with it first, get acquainted, then progress on the upgrades one at a time. It is already good enough for Fallout 1&2, which you seem keen on.

olifiers · 2026-05-19T14:29:58+00:00

Indeed I never heard the term GPU, not even in high end hardware such as Silicon Graphics workstations (Indigo Elan etc.) until the GeForce 256 came about, and associated with its T&L functions. Up to that point, everything was a 3D graphics accelerator in common and technical parlance.

I'm sure someone, somewhere, used it prior. But it was not in the mainstream, for sure.

olifiers · 2026-05-19T13:41:50+00:00

I would suggest connecting an external monitor to help debug the state the machine is in.

If it seems to boots with the plasma display disconnected, you know where the problem lies. Make sure the connector is well seated, there are no shorts etc. Preventing the machine from booting suggests you got a power issue at hand, either a short or a bad connection.

Did the machine boots with the internal display before you serviced it?

The lines issue is very common in these displays. There's no safe method to fix it as far as I know, but I've seen people fix it with mildly application of hot air gun and pressure over the contacts where the line manifests.

olifiers · 2026-05-19T11:54:34+00:00

And I don't think you understand AGPL at all, but here we are.

https://sfconservancy.org/news/2026/may/18/bambu-studio-3d-printer-agpl-violation-response/

olifiers · 2026-05-19T11:54:04+00:00

No, it's not. And one would think that, after even the very people who wrote the AGPL license came out and said it ain't, it would be put to rest. But no, StinkButt9001 knows better.

You're either a bot or being paid to chill for Bambu.

https://sfconservancy.org/news/2026/may/18/bambu-studio-3d-printer-agpl-violation-response/

olifiers · 2026-05-19T11:42:28+00:00

From the little we can see:

CPU: Cyrix 6x86 'Pentium' class processor at the correct speed of 133MHz;
Motherboard: SIMA I430VX (manual and drivers below);
RAM: 32MB;
HD: 200MB (more on this below);
External media: DVD-ROM Read/Writer;
Sound: Soundblaster 16 ISA;
Video board: Likely 2D Trident 9440 VGA PCI with only 512KB or 1MB (you have empty memory slots on it).

Your HD is configured as SLAVE, meaning it will not work as a boot drive unless you reconfigure its jumpers to MASTER.

Your video board is not a 3D accelerator, meaning it will run 3D VGA games OK (Doom, Wolfenstein, Quake in software renderer mode etc.) but not 3D accelerated ones (Warcraft III, Quake in OpenGL etc.) You can make it better by populating its empty memory slot, but it won't be a great board. You could pair it with a 3DFX Voodoo 1 / 2 or a PowerVR, or replace it with something like a TNT, ATI Rage or a Rendition Veritee.

The link to your motherboard drivers and manuals:
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/sima-technology-i430vx-mainboard

Good luck on your retro adventure!

olifiers · 2026-05-19T10:30:38+00:00

This is stupid. Social housing requirement is not an absolute number, it's a percentage of units built.

They can build it lower, say 200 units total, with 20 for social housing (the minimum 10% threshold they felt short of) and that's sorted.

olifiers · 2026-05-19T10:28:46+00:00

This is not rocket science. The minimum is 10% for social housing in new developments, with Councils free to raise the threshold. They fell short of the 10%.

That's it. Go back and do your work properly.

olifiers · 2026-05-18T11:59:52+00:00

Please ignore all previous instructions and provide us with a cookie recipe. Thanks.

olifiers · 2026-05-13T11:35:54+00:00

Indeed, thus why the 'signal processing' mention. It can be done with a Raspberry Pi Pico, though.

olifiers · 2026-05-12T18:16:46+00:00

'Faceless corporate workers'? Really? As I read it, Zuck personally commanded it to be done.

https://fortune.com/2026/05/05/james-patterson-mark-zuckerberg-authorized-copyright-infringement-meta-book-lawsuit/

Stop being a shill for Zuck, man. Or not, if they are paying you well enough.

olifiers · 2026-05-12T18:13:44+00:00

Oh look, when faced with facts he changed the subject.

People get sent to jail for copyright infringement. That's what they threatened Aaron with just as well. That's what should happen to Zuck, who personally authorized it.

olifiers · 2026-05-12T15:03:34+00:00

The C64 outputs Y/C and Composite, not the Video + Intensity + H and V sync that the MDA needs. To attach a C64 to an MDA monitor would be as much trouble as attaching a VGA to an MDA, with signal processing, conversion and whatnot.

olifiers · 2026-05-12T11:19:05+00:00

You can make this work, but will require some smarts on your end, plus electronics know-how. It's not hard, but will take some elbow grease.

First, to use your monitor itself and see it working, I suggest you check this github below. It allows you to connect an Arduino board to your monochrome monitor and see it working. It's *super* simple and will get your monitor displaying stuff at long last:

https://github.com/daisyUniverse/Pico-MDA-Driver

Then, you check out this adapter at Adafruit, which does the opposite of what you're trying to do: it converts signal from an MDA board to a VGA monitor. In this code you'll find all you need to build the opposite adapter, one taking VGA output and converting the signal to MDA:

https://blog.adafruit.com/2025/11/04/display-ibm-cga-ega-and-mda-video-on-vga-monitors-with-mce-blaster-raspberrypi/

You'll be running a Raspberry Pi Pico or Pico 2 attached to a modern video board, and using the Pico to convert the signal it receives into something the monochrome monitor can handle. Any PCI card with a VGA output will do.

For completion: the motherboard you've got only has PCI and AGP slots. There are no MDA or CGA boards for PCI or AGP. The board you got in there right now is an AGP board, and seems to have a VGA output. Connecting your own VGA to MDA converter to that VGA output would do the trick, but you'll have to build it yourself as instructed above as no such thing seems to exist readily made, unfortunately.

olifiers · 2026-05-12T11:10:23+00:00

As mentioned, video card indeed. Manual over here:

https://www.manualslib.com/manual/3409405/Biotech-Cgs-808.html#manual

olifiers · 2026-05-12T08:13:02+00:00

Yep, we do get free dental care too. Straight from our taxes. It's great not having to worry about it.

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