ctrl+z education: 3 months in

this post just kinda goes into detail about the project itself and how it was made and how it’s going now

ctrl+z education backstory

so back in like late november i had an idea: what if instead of using stuff like sketchy ass proxies just to play some laggy ass ripoff mario bros game, we just remote desktoped into actual computers that would run web browsers and even games. now this is not a new idea at all, i actually started doing this shit in 4th grade (don’t ask) but i used chrome remote desktop to remote into my home computer and i’m probably the reason it’s blocked now.

fun fact: around the same time i started working on this, someone else (the one we keep airdropping pear of despair to for no reason) was actually working on a very similar thing but with a different approach.

development

now i had no idea where to start so i set up 2 fucked up but functional laptops and tried using sunshine, a game streaming protocol that exists since we were very performance aimed and also be able to run in a web browser which moonlight has a web version.

fun fact: moonlight also has a 3DS version which is how i tested it initially

but i couldn’t figure out how to change which ports it ran on which is a problem for 2 computers on the same network. so then i tried like 3 other things (one of which you may now know as “specimenware”)

so after that i landed on something called parsec, which wasn’t entirely self hosted but it’s peer to peer after yelling at parsec’s servers so good enough.

after everything was finished

after development it was just kinda just that. it worked fine enough and worked on the chromebook at school. but that’s just the start cuz one of the users started using his system outside of school to play minecraft cuz his actual computer’s too shit. after a while the system that milo used went to chris and holy fuck he’s even more of a specimen.

the big change

now before this both the computers would just be sitting on my desk in view and just kinda be there in the background while i did other stuff:

me working on the pepperoni cooker 2 with the computers just being there

and i mean it was convenient cuz they were right next to the router and i could plug right in with ethernet.

however one day i was having a discussion about some friend group drama and made the mistake of looking to my right just to see POKEMON PORN playing on one of the computers

so after that i moved them to the same room as the server (the fucking imac) so they would be out of view cuz like what the fuck, so now we can only observe specimens voluntarily through specimenware. (or i could just go into the closet but it’s very high up so s)

also there’s 2 new machines but they’re virtual machines that run on the server so that thing’s GPU actually has something to do instead of just sit there idle so yay