Back Into the Hobbies: For Good and Sad Reasons

It happened: I'm back! After months of hiatus, I have decided to return into the ROM hacking community, now exclusively focused on SA-1 Pack/Root content.

The COVID-19 screwed up São Paulo, my city which I live (it just registered 1,000 deaths today and over 20,000 cases) and I'm been into home office on both the company I work at and on my university which I'm still doing my Computer Engineering bachelor's degree for a few weeks.

That means I now have much more free time to work on my hobbies, since I normally spend up to 4 hours on the transit when going to my work's office and my university each day.

More time for the hobbies but my family and me is now on trouble

I currently live with my mom and my girlfriend, while I got home office on my work, they ended up losing their jobs.

That means all monthly income is going exclusively from me and at the same time, the spends increased significantly... stuff like gas and basic food got much more expensive (I kinda don't get why, but okay) and we have the unfortunate timing of part of the hydraulic sewer getting clogged up and we were forced to break part of the bathroom and the kitchen for fixing it. It's a thing that we don't expect it at all.

Awful.

Plans For Here

This month I completed one year at Patreon and all of the support from each patron was used for acquiring better equipment: I got a high-end laptop, a full-HD monitor, controllers, a larger table and a more comfortable chair (which replaced one over ten years old). Stuff that I normally I'm not able to acquire at all since I'm still a junior/university-level developer.

Here is a recent screenshot of my current workplace:

(on the right, my new full-HD monitor, alonge with my work/corporate laptop, with the center being my hobby/daily laptop and on the left some of my SNES carts and equipment. And at the bottom-left my twelve-year old desktop which is rarely used nowadays. My house is not that large so my work/laboratory table is on my living room together the TV)

Since I was busy with my university and lost part of my motivation due of some toxicity I was dealing on the past months, I had to put my hobbies on a hold even if that made me lose some patrons, with the lack of activity and new SA-1 updates.

With the covid-19 situation, housing problems and unemployment on my family the situation has now changed: I'm now with more time for my SNES hobbies but I'm in need for more patrons and support from the community. But in exchange, I'll now work mostly focused on doing new SA-1 game conversions and less research/projects, since the SnesLab is been going fine on itself without my direct lead lately. 

If you would like to see more SA-1 games coming for the next months, consider supporting me! You will not just help seeing more games coming but also will help me dealing better with the worldwide pandemic situation which hit my family pretty hard. On the following days, I'll share a few work in progress logs of my SA-1 Collection Project analysis and I'll start working on the next game. Stay tuned in and I'm counting with each interested reader there!

Although it's not on this folder in particular, the next game that will likely receive the SA-1 treatment is Super R-Type. However, everything is possible at this rate and I'll do my best for doing new releases and without forgetting the pending Contra III and Gradius III patch hardware updates.

Best regards,

Vitor Vilela