Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)

About a year ago, I started working on disassembling the NES game Faxanadu. The goal was to fully understand and document the game, and to produce the most thorough understanding of the game yet. It's been fascinating. The game has a two binary scripting languages (one for interactions with items and NPCs, one for NPC/enemy behaviors) and a very interesting graphics rendering layer. At this point pretty much the entire game is well-understood.

Based on this work, there's now a new suite of tools for producing games under the Faxanadu engine, new major mods built with all this, and some work on a modified ROM better built for porting and modding.

Disassembly is here: https://chipx86.com/faxanadu/

And I've been blogging about it at https://chipx86.blog/

Building a universal web-based retro game modding tool along with that work called Nostalgia Studio. The idea is that there's a core foundation for representing game state and building editors, a platform-specific layer for representing things like the NES APU and PPU state, and then game-specific implementations that populate state for two layers below.

Those are the hobbies.

Day job, I work on Review Board (https://www.reviewboard.org), one of the original code review products. We just released Review Board 8, which was a pretty large project (we built Office document review, browser-native spell checking in CodeMirror, a new interdiff filtering algorithm, Forgejo integration, and a bunch of other things).

So now I'm working on plans for Review Board 9, with a goal of releasing within the next 4-6 months. Got some thoughts on how the review process can be rethought for this current era of development, so starting work on that.

A network diagnostic CLI tool, I made it stable enough to now share. pypi: https://pypi.org/project/tracerate github: https://github.com/rushil-b-patel/tracerate

I have been thinking about building a tool to help teams in different time zones do async work properly. Now with the raise of LLM and agentic workflows/runtimes, it all seems possible so got started on it last weekend.

For now I have a clear vision about what the product should be, what it should do. Mainly, it's a product that should resolve blockers and consensus-seeking problems across time zones.

I'm not sure if something like that would be used, but I really want to try..