jake "ferris" taylor

just another late millennial wasting their potential

TL;DR

dad(jokes), demoscene, rendering, compilers, compression, FPGA, emulation, music production

here you'll find mostly personal projects/random stuff; professionally, I've spent 12 years breaking prod, most recently at ascenium

links
notable projects

"notable", as in, "I think they're neat right now" - also, see demozoo for my demoscene productions

squishy (2016-2021)

Best-in-class executable packer for 64k intros.

xenowing (2018-2023)

A WIP FPGA "demo console" modeled after late '90's-/early 2000's-era game consoles, currently targeting the Mimas A7 dev board.

kaze ιΆ¨ (2019-2023)

An HDL embedded in Rust. Basically driven by the xenowing project.

WaveSabre (2011-2022)

A software synthesizer and toolchain for music for 64k intros.

pulsejet (2021)

A bespoke sample compression codec for 64k intros, specifically designed for integration with WaveSabre.

demotivation (2016-2021)

The tool we made to make our 64k intros in logicoma. Includes a bespoke visual programming language with JIT compiler for driving GPU-based visuals, as well as custom codecs for mesh and motion capture compression. Not publicly released.

rustual boy (2016-2020)

A Virtual Boy emulator. This project actually reached 100% compatibility with the commercial game library, and in many ways is quite accurate. Its development spanned countless livestreams, and also included some cool custom serial/link connector/protocol and CPU fuzzing work, as well as (admittedly few) discoveries about the hardware, like these VSU cycle timings.

butterball (2015-2016)

A Blitz BASIC compiler and interpreter intended to run some code I wrote when I was 13 or so, and found years later.

Poly EP (2014)

My first commercially-released music. Sounds dated now, but I was crazy proud of it at the time.

Presentations

not a complete list, but some stuff I'm particularly happy with

"Modern 64k Intro Compression" at Revision Online 2020

"Massive Sound, Tiny Data - WaveSabre 64k Synth" at demobit 2019

"Supercomposable UI in Fuse: Make Building Apps Playful, not Painful" at Samsung Developer Conference 2017

"Thinking Outside the Cartridge: Modern Ideas on Archaic Devices" at NVScene 2015

"WaveSabre - A Case Study in 64k Synthesis" at The Gathering 2013