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Michael Pavone

@retrodev.com
243 followers 280 following 976 posts

Author of BlastEm, a high-performance accuracy focused emulator for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive: www.retrodev.com/blastem he/him Build more housing! Berkeley, CA

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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 3h
SF has less than 1 million in population so it would need 0.5 sq miles of transit hub district. Seems like the existing C-3 zoned area is at least that big. 25% of the zone needs to allow 12.0 FAR which is higher than the max for C-3 (9.0 for C-3-O), but they can pick and choose where that 25% is
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 3h
It only applies to cities with over 400K population with at least one SB79 stop and it allows the cities in question a lot of latitude to where regional transit hub districts are placed. Just need to be contiguous, >= 0.25 sq miles and contain at least one SB79 stop.
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 3h
My read of AB 2074 is that it sounds like a big deal because it allows some rather tall heights, but the specifics mean the cities impacted don't actually have to change their existing zoning much. Is this correct?
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 25/09/2026
No. You can run MSU-MD games which achieve the same effect, but not MD+
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 25/09/2026
I don't have any plans for this as I'd rather encourage folks to make MSU-MD patches instead. Unlike the SNES, the MD already had a CD add-on so a bespoke hardware extension wasn't really needed
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 21/09/2026
I get why the bet is good for you and I would gladly take your side of the bet myself, but it seemed like you were implicitly saying that if the AI doomers really stood by their convictions they would take the other side. Maybe I misunderstood though.
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 21/09/2026
I think what he means, is what incentive does the person on the other side have to take this bet. If they're right (which to be clear I don't think they are), they get $20K that's probably worthless because of the collapse. Even if the odds were in their favor, the expected value is negative
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Reposted by Michael Pavone
The Hidden Palace @handle.invalid · 20/09/2026
A really cool find from Discord member gageiro: A custom Mega CD BIOS made especially for Sonic Team's creative director Kazuyuki Hoshino! Check it out in action below!
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 19/09/2026
Yeah .md was a response to .bin being ambiguous (I.e. didn't necessarily imply Gen/MD), but there was no actual format change. There are games that need extra metadata for I2C EEPROM or incorrect header data, but everyone just uses a ROM DB to deal with it
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 19/09/2026
.bin was popular for Gen/MD ROMs before .md took off. Back in the day, you had a bunch of weird dumper formats (.smd for Super Magic Drive being most popular) and .bin for flat binaries
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 17/09/2026
The fuel savings from their hybrids are a lot lower than I would have expected and at least in 2024 cost them slightly more to run per mile. Might be different with diesel over $8 a gallon though
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 17/09/2026
Reliability has been an issue with some BEBs, but at least as of the last progress report AC Transit was seeing better mean-time between failures and comparable availability for their Gillig BEBs as Hybrid Diesel, though their non-hybrid diesels were considerably more reliable than either.
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 17/09/2026
California's law prematurely forcing transit agencies to adopt zero-emission busses was ill-advised for a lot of reasons, but given recent diesel prices it's kind of unfortunate the BEB rollout isn't further along. Even with 2024 prices, AC Transit was seeing better cost per mile with Gillig BEBs
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 17/09/2026
I'm still not over the fact that I can almost see this place from my house
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 16/09/2026
I got my solar and storage system through the Bay Area SunShares program from Solar Technologies who are participating again this year. My experience was positive
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Reposted by Michael Pavone
Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 12/09/2026
I promised a new BlastEm release on September 11th... and it's still September 11th here in PST... by 16 minutes anyway. Presenting BlastEm 1.0.0 - supporting most of Sega's 16 and 8-bit hardware. It includes some new features and debugging improvements too www.retrodev.com/blastem/anno...
retrodev.com
BlastEm 1.0.0 Release Announcement
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 12/09/2026
Ah sorry, it actually wouldn't have helped if it was a normal file because it was a top-level IP block for a bunch of Azure IP ranges. I've removed the particular rule I think it was hitting. Let me know if it still can't fetch the source
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 12/09/2026
I think if you're used to mesen, you may still be disappointed, but it meets my needs pretty well. I generally do enjoy working on debug features, so if there's something in particular you need I'm happy to consider adding it.
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 12/09/2026
I've had some debugging support for a long time, but I substantially overhauled the text-mode CPU debugger for this release. The debugger language is now turing complete and has a lot more features. Graphical debugging of the VDP also has some smaller improvements.
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 12/09/2026
I promised a new BlastEm release on September 11th... and it's still September 11th here in PST... by 16 minutes anyway. Presenting BlastEm 1.0.0 - supporting most of Sega's 16 and 8-bit hardware. It includes some new features and debugging improvements too www.retrodev.com/blastem/anno...
retrodev.com
BlastEm 1.0.0 Release Announcement
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 11/09/2026
According to en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%AF%... the answer is yes. Apparently was pronounced fafa in between that and the modern pronunciation
en.wiktionary.org
母 - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 08/09/2026
It's an annoying format to support. It was originally designed for hard drive images and CD image support was tacked on later which adds some complexity. CD extensions also don't feel super well thought out. Also, the only documentation is the MAME source code. Still, I get why folks want it
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 08/09/2026
Made some good progress on adding CHD support to BlastEm over the holiday weekend. Not integrated into the emulator yet, but I was able to decompress some CHDs (though only ones that use zlib and/or FLAC). Should be able to get it finished up in time for the 1.0 release on Friday
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 04/09/2026
This is now a week away! I haven't done a lot to prepare since this last skeet, but I have taken both the 10th and the 11th off which should allow some time for last-minute fixes and improvements
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 04/09/2026
That's pretty tasteless, but I'm not sure it beats this one bsky.app/profile/deca...
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 01/09/2026
Like, huh I wonder why there's such a big jump right around 2022. Pic unrelated
A graph from the St. Louis Federal Reserve's FRED tool showing the percentage change in median CPI from a year ago. There's a large increase in the graph over the course of 2022
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 01/09/2026
The most recent article on this subject was also not adjusting prices for inflation which is questionable in general, but especially so when we had a somewhat recent spate of inflation well above target. $30K in 2015 dollars is $41751.25 in 2026 dollars using CPI.
a chart from a CNN article showing the percentage of new cars sold for less than $30K. A note at the bottom is hilighted that reads: "Note: The $30,000 threshold is not adjusted for inflation."
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 01/09/2026
I don't know how well any of the models handle Z80 assembly or SMS development specifically, but porting code from one language/system to another is something they actually do pretty well at. I agree that this doesn't look LLM generated though.
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 01/09/2026
Wow, they completely ignored the はたらく! Those are working boobs, show some damn respect
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 31/08/2026
Man, I am so glad I built a new PC and splurged on 96GB of RAM back in April 2025. I was worried about tariffs and not shortages, but the timing worked out anyway.
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 30/08/2026
The MD VDP already has the full address bus because it needs them for DMA. TMS design makes sense because it was designed in the context of systems with very small address spaces. And yeah the package count thing is more of an issue there since TMS lacks DMA
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 30/08/2026
Reads are a little messier as prefetch is important to reduce delay to the CPU. You would probably want to keep the prefetch, but discard the result of the saved address doesn't match the next read
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 30/08/2026
You can make VRAM memory mapped without literally putting it on the CPU bus. I don't think it would even be a big change to the VDP. For writes, just populate the address and destination bits of the FIFO entry from the address bus rather than the address and cd regs.
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 27/08/2026
To elaborate on that, there was a period where they were fairly widely available via compounding pharmacies because the FDA declared a shortage of the drugs. That's now over and in theory the compounding pharmacies are only allowed to make them in fairly limited quantities for specific patients.
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 27/08/2026
How would that work for GLP-1s. Aren't those still under patent in the US? With insulin there have been a lot of patent shenanigans to try to keep generics off the market, but what CalRx is providing (insulin glargine-yfgn) was already available as a generic before the program started
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 25/08/2026
I do agree that it's hard to understand the motivation for this sort of project though. For a development tool or even a game, I can understand being more worried about the destination than the journey, but not this. As you say porting an OS to the MCD is really only useful for bragging rights
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 25/08/2026
Having poked around in the repo a bit, it doesn't seem like they gave the LLM a lot of guidance. Really seems like they just gave it a goal and let it rip, so they might not have much of a foundation to learn how to do it the hard way. Impossible to say for sure without more info though
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 24/08/2026
I'm resigned to the fact that professional software development is increasingly LLM reliant, but I find it's prevalence in the retro scene depressing. I enjoy working on this stuff for the challenge and because I can ignore the kind of ROI concerns of real work
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 24/08/2026
Feels like every time I see a neat retro Sega project these days, once I look under the hood it's obvious it's AI generated. Latest example is a port of emuTOS to Mega CD. Not disclosed, but a quick look at PLAN.md in the repo makes it fairly obvious
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Reposted by Michael Pavone
MatteusBeus Retro Developer @matteusbeus.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
If you want to support someone trying to make their childhood dream to publish a sega mega drive game and be successful at it then now is your chance ❤️ wishlist: store.steampowered.com/app/4909120/...
store.steampowered.com
Chords on Steam
Chords is an authentic retro 16-bit cyberpunk visual novel. Dive into a twisting, deceptive story packed with pixel art, chiptune energy, and classic adventure vibes where nothing is quite what it see...
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 23/08/2026
If you mean the stunt show at Universal, I actually went to that before seeing the movie. It's actually quite good
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 21/08/2026
There is definitely a certain "smell" to Claude PR descriptions/comments that makes them relatively easy to spot. And currently you do still need someone who knows what they're doing to consistently get good results which is why people who don't blasting the AI slop cannon are making such a mess
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 21/08/2026
I don't use these tools at all on BlastEm, but I do use them a little at work, both because there's an expectation and because I want to understand how screwed I am long-term. I've seen LLMs find bugs in closed source code that is definitely not in the training data
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 21/08/2026
So I think it's a bit difficult to disentangle ability to recall answers from the training data from ability to reason, but I think the evidence that at least some of what's happening is reasoning is pretty clear for better or worse.
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 21/08/2026
It's not a great movie, but it wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting. The characters are a bit bland and underdeveloped, but the action and effects are pretty good. An almost completely flooded world makes for a fairly unique setting even if it is implausible
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 21/08/2026
I spent over 6 years of my life working on a game very loosely based on Waterworld. Over 7 years later, I'm finally watching the movie for the first time.
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 20/08/2026
I get why they're chasing live-service even if I don't like it, but they really went about it in the stupidest way possible. The smart way would be to let their successful single-player narrative heavy game studios do what they do best and hire/acquire talent that knows the live-service market.
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Reposted by Michael Pavone
Warren Wells, AICP @warrenjwells.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
It really is crazy that we need winq do-or-die election to keep Bay Area transit alive, all while the state's unelected DOT staffers pour billions into a sinking roadway.
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 18/08/2026
Roko's bicyclist
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Michael Pavone @retrodev.com · 18/08/2026
I've just been cursed with the knowledge that I live within a short walk of the "AI safety" sex cult headquarters...
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