Ty Porter's personal blog
This is the conclusion to my previous posts about Mudora and randomized A Link to the Past – Reverse Engineering A Link to the Past Randomizer and I Analyzed 28k+ Randomized ALttP ROMs So You Don’t Have To . Today I’ll be talking about writing a shortest-path solver for ALttPR in Mudora, similar to what you might find on the spoiler log for a game generated on alttpr.com . Where We Left Off In a…
In my previous post Reverse Engineering A Link to the Past Randomizer I discussed developing Mudora , a Go tool to analyze randomized A Link to the Past ROMs even when they’re encrypted. This post is a follow up to that work, where I wanted to use my new tool to analyze a corpus of randomized games to see if there were any latent features that could speed up optimal play in ALttPR. While item…
I play a ton of randomized Zelda: A Link to the Past. I probably average one game per week, especially now that there’s a weekly community race Reddit where competitors share the same seed. I’m not the fastest at completing it, but the original game is one of the greatest games of all time, if not the greatest. The randomizer adds so much depth and replayability on top of it. ALttPR Background A…
I’ve been putting off writing about this because I wasn’t sure how I felt about it and it took some time to work through. Long story short, someone is selling physical copies of Pocket League, the Gameboy game I developed 5 years ago. If you’re not familiar with Pocket League, it’s a Gameboy demake of Rocket League. I wrote an entire blog series kicking off this blog, which you can find here:…
According to Steam, I’ve played thousands of hours of Zombie Panic! Source. It’s one of my favorite Source mods, and zombies are my guilty pleasure. This week the original Half Life mod released on Steam after over 20 years of existence, and I never really got a chance to play it originally. It’s been a blast! Both games heavily feature asymmetric gameplay that just feels great when everything…
One of the things I’ve always wanted to do ever since I built RGBMatrixEmulator is have a live cluster of MLB LED scoreboards available on demand. Well, today’s the day! It’s pretty simple: Set up a Dockerfile Clone mlb-led-scoreboard Expose the RGBMatrixEmulator port, by default 8888 And you’re done! Of course, this procedure could be repeated for any project that uses hzeller’s…
DISCLOSURE: I received a review copy of this book from No Starch Press in October 2025. The following represents my honest opinions – I do not receive any sort of additional compensation including affiliate rewards from links presented herein. I purchased a physical copy of the book prior to this review. Almost 4 years ago I started this blog with a series on creating a Game Boy (specifically DMG)…
When it comes to LED matrices, I’m sort of famous for not actually having a lab setup (see: posts tagged with RGBMatrixEmulator and RGBMatrixEmulator itself ) and prefer to emulate in software. However, this week, I got to play with a real Raspberry Pi again, and it wasn’t just the usual “flash an SD card, download some software, push some pixels”. I got to dig into the guts of Python, Cython, and…
All of the interesting problems in this blog come from the MLB LED scoreboard at this point I believe. My role on maintaining the project is rapidly becoming the gatekeeper of “how do we make the application more configurable” while keeping in mind that we now have a huge permutation of configuration options across hardware we don’t control. It is hard to complain, though. It really is an…
Yesterday, v0.12.3 of RGBMatrixEmulator released , featuring mainly non-functional changes around automated testing and a new CI pipeline that runs in GitHub Actions. For those not familiar with RGBME, here’s the full context . Long story short, it’s an emulator for Raspberry Pi HUB75 LED matrices. In the last few RBME releases I accidentally caused a a few bugs, so I set out to write some tests…