Blog · 2 min read
Episode 368
Pixel Cherry Ninja covered my Super Mario All-Stars recomp, and the channel deserves more than a thank you.
Somebody made a video about something I built, and I have been refreshing the view count like a lunatic ever since.
Pixel Cherry Ninja covers emulation and retro gaming — MiSTer FPGA cores, native PC ports, recompilations, the whole corner of the hobby that exists because people keep deciding old games should still run. Episode 368 went up today. My Super Mario All-Stars recomp is the first thing in the title, and the segment starts at 1:25.
This is the first time anything I have made has turned up on a channel like that. Eighteen thousand people subscribe to it. I have been doing this long enough to know that is not a number that changes my life, and also that it is eighteen thousand more people than were looking last Tuesday.
What the channel actually does
It is worth saying plainly, because it is the part people outside this hobby miss.
The emulation and preservation scene has almost no press. There is no trade magazine. Publishers are not sending out review copies of a fan recompilation of a 1993 SNES cartridge. The way anybody finds out that a thing exists is that somebody with a camera sits down every week and goes through what shipped.
That is what this is. Episode 368 — not 368 videos, 368 of this one show — with a news team credited in the description, a sources blog anybody can check, and a run of segments in a single episode that covers a Super Paper Mario PC port, four separate recomps, Breath of the Wild running natively on Apple Silicon, a Pulseman port, and a MiSTer core for Midway's Y-Unit arcade board. That is one week.
Doing that consistently is unglamorous and it is the only reason most of these projects reach anybody at all. A recomp with no coverage is a GitHub repo with eleven stars. The people who do this work are the distribution layer for a scene that has no other one.
So: thank you. Genuinely. Not for covering mine — for covering all of it, every week, for 368 weeks.
On the recomp itself
I am not going to oversell it. It is a recompilation, which means the original game turned into a real native program for Mac, Windows and Linux rather than an emulator pretending to be a console. Crisp at any size, a proper launcher, controller support.
You bring your own copy of the game. That part is not negotiable and never will be.
More on the rest of what I am rebuilding over on my decomps page.