A Plan for 2026

January 12, 2026

Over the last couple of years, I’ve started a handfull of projects for personal use. None of them have ever reached a completed state if there even is such a thing. The problem with having too many projects is that I can’t decide what to work on; instead I spend my time playing games or even starting yet another project.

Lets list the most developed projects I’ve started the last two years or so, and at the end go over what project I’ve decided to focus on for 2026.

This project was started as a reaction to the suboptimal navigation in the current GameShell menu. I won’t go into details, but the current menu is itself a rewrite in Go of the original menu written in Python. Go seems fine and all, but the menu animations are blocking the navigation, and input events are queued and played after the animations are done. This annoyed me so much that I started a second re-write in C++.

The current state of my implementation have a functioning menu (with fast navigation) where I can start the games and change volume and screen brightness. There are a lot of things missing for a fully functional replacement, but it works well enough for my needs (i.e. starting an emulator to play Tetris).

snoofs - a TNFS server

Looking for a fun project for my continued Rust journey, I decided to implement a TNFS server. TNFS is a very simple but not very secure protocol for transmitting files, designed to run on very limited hardware, like the Sinclair Spectrum 48K. It’s used by the FujiNet device to access files and disk images on remote servers.

There is quite good documentation of TNFS, but my main issue is that there is no real versioning of the protocol. snoofs currently only support UDP, but I’d like to add TCP support as well before a potential public release.

mineserve - Minecraft server management tool

A few years ago, I stopped subscribing to Minecraft Realms to host my Minecraft worlds at home instead. I know there already exist management tools but I wanted to make one myself (yes, this is also a project to get more fluent in Rust). It currently can start and stop a local server through a web interface, but I’m not really using it. I only have one world that I want to host right now anyway.

Mobilder - a personal replacement for Instagram

This is the least developed project, but also the one I would have most use of. Way back in the early naughties, I had a section on my personal site where I could upload pictures from my phone (via mail, although I mostly uploaded them from a computer). At the time, the quality of the photos were really bad, something like 0.1MP. This was more or less what Instagram did years later when phones had much better cameras and internet access.

Now that the big tech companies made internet suck, I wan’t to go back to hosting photos on my own server. I tried Pixelfed, but it’s way to complex for my needs.

What I want is an easy to install, self-hosted replacement for Instagram for a single user or a small group of people. My end goal is to support the ActivityPub protocol and join the Fediverse; be compatible with Pixelfed clients or have a custom client app for phones. An MVP would be a way to log in and upload a photo through a web form, and display all photos in a public feed.

ABC80x em - An ABC 80 emulator

I’ve been tempted to write an emulator for some time, but never really found the inspiration. When a friend of mine hinted that he would like an easy to use emulator for his childhood computer—the ABC 800—I decided to give it a try, starting with it’s predecessor the ABC 80. Everything is more or less written from scratch (you guessed it, in Rust). The only external dependency is SDL2 (with OpenGL) for rendering. It emulates the Z80 CPU, the PIO for keyboard input and tape emulation, and a (sort of) cycle accurate Video generation. Only the base ABC 80 is currently supported and sound emulation is missing.

I want to give it a bit more love before I release it to the public, but since I don’t have the original machine and have almost never used one, it’s hard to find motivation. Maybe I need to have a talk with my friend again about the ABC 800. :D

What’s next for 2026

I’ve decided to try to focus my time on developing the Mobilder web service. I miss posting images for my friends and family, and I think there could be a big interest from other people on the web that feels the same way as I do about the current state of the internet.

Having said that, I will work on other projects, but not as a main focus. The ABC 80 emulator is really close to a beta release, so I will probably take a few days before the end of the year to package it up for download. It will show up on my itch.io when ready.