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Going into the directory of a full romset and running a script that launches a random game from there is one of the greatest ways to play. Nothing else compares. I have a long draft half-finished to start a thread about it actually that this conversation is making me feel like I ought to wrap up and post.
In general, I feel like much of the world has been driven out of their minds by the malign religious ideals of money and intellectual property, and as a result we have a media environment that actively seeks to destroy some peopleās lives and presents an immense volume of a kind of dreary grey sequels-and-reruns paste to everyone else in a horrifying simulacrum of an organically-thriving culture. Itās amazing how far everyone has dragged art, one of the most precious aspects of human life, into such a dismal pit of greed and emptiness, with seemingly only faint complaints from distant corners. Luckily art itself is still wonderful, in the broadest sense, and no one can take that from anyone.
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if rockstar games was cool they would join the ransomware group so they can pay their developers more to make their dope and badass games
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would love to read this if only to ask about what your script looks like cos weāve been doing this at my house for a while now by generating a random number and choosing the corresponding game from a big pile.
@Echo Off
Set "SrcDir= C:\Papers\"
Set "ExtLst=*.pdf *.epub"
Set "i=0"
For /F "Delims=" %%A In ('Where /R "%SrcDir%" %ExtLst%') Do (Set /A i+=1
Call Set "$[%%i%%]=%%A")
Set /A #=(%Random%%%i)+1
Call Start "" "%%$[%#%]%%"
If on windows, I have one. My batch file for random open papers, change the SrcDir or ExtLst to your rom folder and rom file types
the premise is that you have specified the executable program for the file type
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god i gotta learn to write bat scripts i still canāt read them very well. gotta learn to write python scripts too. 
i thiiink the miyoo onion os has a random game function
With pleasure!! ^^ It is in my draft for that post, so itāll appear there too, but in any case, Iām more than happy to share it.
Just to quickly state how it works at the get-go, the way I actually use it is like, at the shell, I navigate to a directory with roms in it, then enter either mednarand (for Mednafen) or msxarand (for openMSX). This launches the respective emulator with a random file from the current directory (excluding 7-zip archives), and prints the filename to the console for future reference. Itās very convenient but took a bit of setting-up, which Iāll describe.
The script itself is in Ruby, a lovely āscripting languageā which I think a lot of people with an interest in Python might also consider checking out. The script is short and kinda quick-and-dirty, without error handling or anything:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'shellwords'
args = {
emulator: ARGV.first,
file: `ls | grep -v \'\\.7z$\' | shuf`.lines.first,
}
puts args[:file]
escaped = args.map {|k, v| [k, Shellwords.escape(v.strip)] }.to_h
`#{escaped[:emulator]} #{escaped[:file]}`
This is designed to run in the kind of command-line environment that Linux and macOS have (Unix-style). Linux and macOS also usually have Ruby installed by default, and this only uses the Ruby standard library, so in those sorts of places this script should ājust work.ā On Windows, itās harder to use for two reasons: you have to install a Unix-style environment and configure it which takes a bit of doing for the uninitiated, and also, this script passes the name of the rom file to the emulator as a command-line argument which many Windows graphical programs arenāt made to cope with. You can use emulators that run in a Unix-style environment and they will accept the file as a command-line argument almost certainly, but your favorite emulator in Windows might not be one of those. I started writing up a guide for Windows users on how to use this script, but I kind of realized itās not exactly a walk in the park for these reasons; if youāre a Windows user and you really want to use this, though, let me know and I can help you. I always like to introduce Windows users to the beauty of the Unix command line 
it makes it way easier to do all sorts of fun things like this.
Anyway, I have this script in a file called emurand on my PATH (meaning I can run it from the command line no matter where I am in the filesystem by typing emurand). It takes one argument, the name of a command that launches an emulator; for example I could run it by navigating to a directory with roms in it and then entering emurand mednafen, which would launch Mednafen (on my system) with a random rom from the directory.
Because I mainly use this script with Mednafen and openMSX, I have two aliases defined as part of my shell config:
alias mednarand="emurand mednafen"
alias msxarand="emurand openmsx"
With these, I can enter mednarand at the command line and itās exactly as if I entered emurand mednafen.
Using this script has been one of my favorite ways to play games for some years now. When I was a kid I used to do it by just scrolling up and down in a big list of roms with my eyes closed, which was basically just as good (this approach is only a little more convenient and strictly random). Either way, you discover all sorts of amazing things, itās a whole wild experience ^^
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Kenji Eno doc is up with subs
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after my own heart
try ChatGPT, easily to rewrite script in different languages
i would NOT recommend using ChatGPT to write code in a language you donāt already know.
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4 works better now, even now I donāt know any of Dart language but already work with some products by GPT. The point is know how to feed the error message, manual and some sites you think of helpful, it will work perfectly.
Ora.ai is one of the best pre tool, highly recommend it.
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PS1 aesthetic horror game about giving people colonoscopies. Full credit for original concepts.
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i found it really handy to generate boilerplate code for talking to amazon web services (i was able to give it commands like āgive me the above but with fewer nested callbacksā to refine the code, which was nice) and also to spit out a python script to help prepare an app for internationalization. (it was basically a glorified find and replace and i didnāt want to have to look up how to interact with basic python apis for talking to the operating system.) i expect to be able to do this with a llm that runs locally at some point, maybe a viable option exists now, i just havenāt investigated it yet. itāll probably fuck up the industry beyond recognition at some point
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the industry will finally be free from the shackles chaining them the the whims of people whoāve read the manual documentation for os.walk
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i know i read it like 10 years ago but donāt have eidetic recall
Yes, but none of them is a good deal right now, mostly, Llama-2 liked 7B require one A100 40gb, 180B needs 4 at least.
all the progress depend on Jensen now.
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