Why do we do this?

Sometimes I have interesting offline conversations that I think would be worth opening up to the wider community, and this I believe is one of them.

Why do we do this?

I don't mean making stuff, coding, retro games, I mean sharing in words and video content.

It's certainly not directly financially rewarding (though as mentioned on twitter, there are income streams that can support us, in some cases healthily).

Engagement on my accounts is pretty flat, so it isn't for fame either.

So that rules out fame and fortune.

For me I got most of the rewards out of being part of the community. I give content, and in return I get feedback, advice, people to turn to when I have a gnarly issue I can not resolve, and I get inspiration. If nothing else, I get to see funny memes :)

As an example, my long-term ambition of seeing my own code running on my own home-made game cartridge, and specifically Gameboy.

I was a teenager when the Gameboy came out, but way before that I was fascinated by cartridges. The best games on the Vic 20 were cartridge based and something about the format just filled me with wonder.

Two things get my nerd-juices going more than anything are building my own hardware and software, and game cartridges encompass both :)

Through the community I learned about a reasonably priced tool for burning Gameboy ROMs, another lead me to cheap cartridges on Aliexpress, and another to a Pascal compiler that can generate (z80-variant) assembly code that can then generate working Gameboy code.

Without this community my little proof of concept would still just be a concept :)