Happy New Years and 2023 Plans

Happy New Years, if a bit late. Originally I wasn't gonna write anything but I figure I haven't written in a while. A couple weeks ago I won an auction on an IS-NITRO EMULATOR USG model with Wi-Fi fin, which is set to arrive some time within the month in theory. The listing did have a "junk" label on it, but I'm hopeful that this was simply because the seller did not have the hardware and software to verify that it was working correctly. I'll need to get a GameCube AC adapter and appropriate USB cable to connect it to my laptop with the debugger software and hope for the best.

I've been working on NitroPaint somewhat again, I tried resurrecting an old featre idea to allow for palette re-grouping in the character map color reduction. It didn't produce satisfactory results in all cases before so I scrapped it, but I've left it in for now just in case. I may implement some UI to control this feature at some point, or if I can get its quality up to par all the time then maybe make it a default feature.

I've had some thoughts as well for revisiting my old DS-specific video codec idea, except this time I might be utilizing the 2D engine's graphical features instead of the 3D engine's. Planned are features like separate P and I frames and rudimentary motion compensation. Character compresion may hope to reduce the size of data in addition to the I and P frames. Due to the limitations of the way I've planned it out, there can be at most 3 I frames for 1 P frame. This is because I don't plan on using any features like display capture at the moment, just the basic 2D hardware features. This may change in the future however, to be determined.

Other plans for the New Year are finally working through my backlog of books I've been meaning to read. I haven't even finished Poland despite having started it several months ago. I feel like for a while I've lacked the mental energy to get to finishing a book, but I want to change that this year. I've also been meaning to pick back up on my Mandarin Chinese studies, and one of the things I've always wanted to do is read a book entirely in Chinese. One that I've wanted to read is 活著, since I've already watched the movie by this point, hopefully the book won't be too difficult to follow. It'll be trial by fire for sure.

In addition to those I have been long wanting to read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It's frustratingly similar to modern English to where it looks like something I should be able to understand easily but can't. It's definitely something I'll want to have a Middle English to Modern English dictionary handy while reading. Next step up from that would be to read Beowulf, but I don't expect to be able to do that at any point soon. That may be a better resolution for some future New Year.