Aaron Giles

About Me

2024 Year In Review

Another year in the books! Time to reflect back and see what I did with myself...

Family & Travel

This year’s travel was substantially less eventful than last year’s at least.

In May I found out that my siblings and my dad were getting together at my sister’s place in Cleveland for Memorial Day weekend. I’d been thinking about doing a solo visit back to the old stomping grounds, so I arranged privately with my dad for a visit so that I could surprise everyone.

I flew into Cleveland on a redeye, then had a bunch of hours to kill before people were gathered, so I found a Metropark and went on a crazy long walk to keep myself awake. Then had some brunch and launched the surprise. It was fun!

I spent a couple of days in Cleveland with my sister and her family, then traveled to Toledo to meet with my brother’s family and my besties from grade school. After that I drove into Michigan to hit the two most famous breweries: Founders (in Grand Rapids) and Bells (in Kalamazoo). Spent a night in Kalamazoo, then drove over to the small town of Saline visit my dad for a couple of days.

Our summer travel plans never really coalesced and before we knew it we had only awkward amounts of time left in our schedule. We eventually did get out of the house during a weeklong heatwave and drove up to Bellingham, WA to check out the area and Mt. Baker. It was a nice, low-key trip, and 10 degrees cooler than we would have been otherwise, so we’ll call it a minor success.

Programming

In terms of programming, I spent the year mostly continuing work on my DREAMM emulator.

I was originally going to focus solely on DOS games for DREAMM 3.0, but then I ran into an interesting issue: several DOS games I was supporting had Windows releases as well. And these are early 16-bit Windows programs: Windows 3.x, which I sort of already supported for Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures.

So I ended up spending a good amount of time improving 16-bit Windows support enough to run the Windows versions of Pipe Dream and Star Wars Chess, which was a pretty involved project. And then I discovered one more 16-bit Windows “game”: Star Wars Screen Entertainment, a collection of cheesy screensavers. So this “DOS-only” release ended up becoming quite Windows-heavy in the end.

Another big change I decided to tackle for this next DREAMM version was the addition of CRT shader effects. It has always been in my long-term plans to do this, but I serendipitously ran into John Novak, the guy who had spent a ton of time implementing and tweaking CRT shaders for DOSBox Staging. He was prepared to explain what he did and even help offer configuration parameters that matched CGA/EGA/VGA screens, so I figured I should tackle it while I had his ear.

This meant I had to change my rendering system to use OpenGL instead of the SDL renderer, which was a pretty big change. DREAMM 3.0 finally released in July, followed by bugfix releases in August and October.

Of course, I immediately got to work on the next version.

This version, which is coming along, will cover the Windows games released before the year 2000, including the first few games released by Lucas Learning. All in all, it’s a dozen games, almost all Star Wars themed (remember, The Phantom Menace came out in 1999!) Hopefully it will be ready to release early in 2025.

In order to support these new games, I had to tackle several new big ticket items in Windows, which has taken a lot of time but has also been pretty rewarding:

Each one of these items was a substantial amount of work! Honestly, I’m quite pleased to have gotten all of them in pretty decent working order by the end of the year.

Toward the end of the year, I signed a licensing deal for DREAMM to be used as the DOS emulator in Digital Eclipse’s Tetris Forever collection. DREAMM was ideally suited for this project, since the Tetris games used manual-based copy protection, and I already had a mechanism to handle that.

However, to make it really shine, I decided to take this use as an opportunity to rework my internal scripting systems into a unified language that could be used to hook and automate several types of tasks, including copy protection, installers, and configuration. I ended up reworking all my existing protection helpers to leverage this, so in the next version all of the protection help will be (optionally) automated.

Finally, I did yet another online interview with Daniel Albu talking about the prerelease of DREAMM 3.0. And I’m now up to over 2000 users, so things are chugging along nicely.

Music

A fairly straightforward musical year this time around.

I completed my second season and started a third singing with Sine Nomine Renaissance Choir as the tenor section lead.

I managed to pull off yet another Summer Fling Singers concert, Lifecycles, featuring for the first time a director I hadn’t previously worked with, Giselle Wyers. Of course, she came with glowing recommendations, and worked out very well for the group. But I did have to scramble a bit to come up with the repertoire, since none of my existing ideas seemed to click. In the end, however, I’m pretty pleased with how the program turned out.

And I’m finally officially an ex-board member of the Greater Seattle Choral Consortium, though I still do run the website.

Web Development

Not much new on the Web side of things this year.

I made a few tweaks to the Greater Seattle Choral Consortium website, but nothing substantial after last year’s rework. Toward the end of the year, I did update my concert posting bot to also post to BlueSky, in addition to the old X account.

I didn’t make any further progress on postcard tagging for my postcardware.net collection; still sitting at about 5000/6000 tagged. I really should finish that up! One minor update I did make was to create a BlueSky bot to pair with my Mastodon bot. Unfortunately, my original Mastodon host decided to shut down, so I had to find another Mastodon host. This went fine except that the migration process failed to migrate 75% of my followers, so the end result is that postcardbot is kind of lonely now.

rehearsaltracks.net continues to chug along, with a few paying clients helping to provide the necessary support to keep it going.

Other Stuff

Weight took some ups and downs this year, but I'm ending down about 5lbs from last year, so that’s good. Hoping I can trend it downward again soon. Was doing well until Thanksgiving hit, then I had my birthday, and Christmas, and well, you know how it goes!

I continued my comfort watching of (mostly) sci-fi/fantasy/horror series this year, generally taking in an hour show each night before bed. This year, I managed to watch or complete:

Read 26 books this year, pretty much the same pace as last year. Here’s this year’s GoodReads page. And my own summary (asterisks indicate a re-read):

 

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