12/18/2025

Starting around October 2025, when Twitch decided to get rid of a bunch of their ingest servers, I hate to think it is because they needed those servers for something asinine, I started getting at least 20 minutes of constant dropped frames, almost always after 5 PM. I later found out this is actually a decently common issue, with at least one Reddit poster saying their only solution was to change ISPs. That is not an option for me, as much as I am that one guy on the side of the fence seeing the speeds of AT&T Fiber. Instead, I looked into finding what could possibly be causing that issue. To make a long story short, I still do not know why even as a man who has taken enough Networking classes to take the CCNA test, but never did.

To make the long story long, the first culprit I was thinking was going to be an issue is the culprit a Comcast tech would have pointed to if I ended up getting one to my house: my Powerline adapters. If you don't know, Powerline adapter convert a direct Ethernet connection to electricity, which then goes to another Powerline adapter in a different room in the house. It is not perfect, but ideally, it is better than Wi-Fi for online gaming. I mainly bought those adapters for my old PS4 Amateur, a console that has notoriously bad Wi-Fi, and I end up using it for online gaming on the consoles and PC, and giving my old Xbox 360 an internet connection as the Wi-Fi adapter is broken. I also found it was more consistent than Wi-Fi for Twitch streams. However, they were getting old, and while they seemed to be working, I can imagine they would cause something like this. I also found out that Ethernet cord's connectors were slightly broken. I knew enough networking to know that isn't too much of a problem as long as those little wires connect in the right way, but I certainly embraced the possibility that this is a $10 problem rather than a $110 problem.

I unhooked the Powerlines, even unhooked the Ethernet cable from the modem, and just had my computer do Wi-Fi. 5:00 PM rolls around, and the dropped frames came in. Part of me was relieved; those Powerline adapters were expensive. I also did pings to my modem and a close Comcast server's IP address, and those did not drop. These tests did prove the problem is not between my PC and the modem, it's between the modem and Twitch. I felt defeated, but I did not want to give up just yet.

I did rehook up the Powerlines, though I made it a part of my later to-do list to get another Ethernet cable, so I ended up doing the next stream with Wi-Fi as well. Here's what I ended up doing:

Updated OBS to the latest version. I did not even realize it was out of date, and usually updating OBS leads to issues, but maybe updating an OBS with issues could lead to no issues.

On the Twitch website, Creator Dashboard > Settings > Stream > Changed latency mode to normal. I love when chat can just react to what I just did, especially in my DDR/Stepmania streams, but it would be a worthy sacrifice.

In the OBS settings, Output > Change Advanced to Simple. I then changed the Video Bitrate to 4000 kbps. I may be able to go a bit higher, but that seemed to work for my 60 FPS 720p streams. I did a lot of experimentation, but that may have been back when Twitch had a bunch of ingest servers, and we live in a different world now.

Advanced > Turn on "Dynamically change bitrate to manage congestion (beta)". Heard good things about this setting.

Advanced > Turn on "Enable network optimizations". Also heard good things about this setting even if it doesn't seem to have any description beyond promises of optimization. For all I know, it's OBS's equivalent to Rock Band's Awesomeness Detection, which does literally nothing. Do not fact check me on this, I already know I am not a networking genius.

I started my stream earlier, credit fed through The Outfoxies, a game that is a bit jankier than I remembered but is still a very great game that should have gotten a Saturn port, and decided to do a still live on Twitch bandwidth test by live reacting to commercials. Here's a clip of that, the live reaction wasn't really something that ended up being a classic in my eyes. I would watch the commercials and occasionally glance at the dropped frames. 5:08 PM, 5:15 PM, 5:30 PM, I looked at that counter, and I was so happy inside to see a 0. Yes, there were some hiccups in the beginning of my stream according to the Twitch Inspector, but those hiccups just led to one to two seconds of slightly blurry stream, a huge improvement over 20 minutes of unwatchable pausing and buffering.

Are my troubles miles away, just like that one Christmas song? I am sure this will not be the only time my Twitch streams will fail, and I do want to experiment if I can change back that latency mode setting or even up the bitrate and see if it causes any issues. All I can say is that, in the immortal words of one Sana, not the one from Bemani, "there's no point worrying about things you can't fix. (There's no point worrying about things you can't fix.)"

11/15/2025

Not really an update, but I just wanted to see how YouTube videos load with my current CSS. Here's a video of someone who knows rhythm games, namedropping DJMAX at the very least, reviewing Konami's godawful attempt to siphon the rock game bubble. Glad they didn't just say "this game has flat scrolling and bad covers, 2 I'd rather play Guitar Heros out of 5, this is the beginning of an era of lame Guitar Hero ripoffs, I'd rather play Bassoon Hero", actually highlighting the good covers and Steve Ouimette's great video on his experience working on the game.

I'm really glad YouTube (and SoundCloud, come to think of it) still has "embed" in their sharing options. Most people don't really deal with HTML in their lives as Geocities is gone and social media sites just want you to paste a link to a YouTube video. I've learned that my college doesn't even have an HTML class anymore; it really is becoming a lost art.

11/3/2025

I bought a bunch of pixel fonts from itch.io, I might as well try to make something with them, so today, I decided to make a new logo. It's been at least 5 years, it's time for a refresh, and a logo that is derivative of Alt's logo from pop'n music has got to go.

I took a little break from streaming for a few reasons. The first is that I completed both of the games I wanted to finish in October, Pac-Man World 2 Re-Pac and Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. The second is that I do have plans for next week's streams starting on November 11th: playing the files in the Triple Cross Fall Brawl, a Stepmania contest. The third, well, I kind of wanted to retool OrangeStreams for a while, and this break along with the Fall Brawl streams will allow me to think about what I want to do with my Twitch streams from now on.

A part of the reason why I started OrangeStreams was to give me a reason to go through my backlog of games, and I was thinking, hey, some people would want to see that. And sure, I occasionally got views from big fans of the games I played, and I appreciate all of those views, but I don't think I was doing too well with them. Case in point: I've been streaming on Twitch for the last 6-7 years, and I haven't gotten to Affiliate. Once Twitch decided to put a limit on highlights, which I was using as an archive of the games I've beaten as opposed to what it was supposed to be used for (y'know, highlights), I just felt like I was streaming into a void. I do not stream for the fame or fortune, and I'm glad I had a reason to play through all of those games I wouldn't have finished otherwise, but I feel like I should try to grow my channel rather than keep it stagnant.

I'm not sure what I will do just yet. More showcase streams, just be a rhythm game streamer, maybe even Fortnite which I am not horrible at but I know I'll be one little fish in a giant pond full of them, but I have time to think about it. Maybe not Fortnite. All I will say is that if you liked what you saw, thank you very much. I will see you on November 11th with Triple Cross Fall Brawl.

10/19/2025

Windows is kind of terrible now, isn't it? Windows wanting people to talk to their computers and have Copilot do everything for them, the ads, the bloat, and the Windows 10 end of service apocalypse combined with Windows 11 not supporting a lot of PCs despite Microsoft really, really wanting people to use 11, I have never seen so many people on my searches considering a switch to a different OS. I do use Windows 11, it's just a worse Windows 10, but recent news has made me think of the idea of moving to Linux. I do not think I'm going Mac even though I have an iPhone and an iPad. It is sort of funny, but for a lot of the same reasons why I haven't jumped onto Linux, I'm not planning on giving up Windows just yet.

The biggest reason why I am still sticking with Windows 11 for now is that I remember trying to install Linux once in the late 2000s. I wanted it to be a dual boot with Linux Mint, because I tried it out as a USB boot and I really liked it. Somehow, it ended with my PC not being able to boot into Windows anymore. I do not know what happened, but what I do know is that I do not want to destroy a computer with about 6 years of history on it. I was able to boot into the Linux Mint USB drive and rescue a few files. I really wish I could have rescued more, but I think I was limited by what USB thumb drives I had in whenever that was. If I could tell my past self anything, I would have told him to rescue those early FL Studio files, which I never backed up. They were probably terrible anyway and it's likely they would not load in modern FL Studio, but I still sometimes think about what I lost.

I decided to look through everything I do on my current Windows PC, and this is what I figured out through research, from least amoust of issues to most:

• Web browsing: This should not be a problem at all; Linux has both Chrome and Firefox. The only major problem is DRM; I might not be able to use my Linux PC to watch Xfinity Stream. I can just use my iPad for that.
• Emulation: Even as someone who doesn't like using RetroArch on PC, though will begrudgingly use it if I ever get into RetroAchievements, all of the emulators I actively use on PC have Linux versions.
• Programming: MonoGame is on Linux, even Visual Studio Code is on Linux! The potential for me being a game programmer again does make me want to keep a Windows installation for what will probably be the majority of my potential market.
• Streaming: OBS has a Linux version, and I do not have any special Windows-only plugins as far as I can tell. Logi Options+ is not on Linux, which allows me to set no low light compensation as the default. It will be a problem if I have to turn that off manually every time, and it would especially be a problem if I can't!
• Video Games in General: Steam has a Linux client, Epic and GOG are supported by Lutris.
• Rhythm Games: Project OutFox and ITGMania have Linux versions, and Beatoraja, being a Java program, is only slightly more difficult to run on Linux. I heard EZ2ON and DJMAX Respect run well on Proton on Linux with only minor issues involving the video, which are easy to fix.
• Music: foobar2000 is not on Linux. I'm sure it wouldn't be too much of a hassle to find a program that plays MP3s and FLAC files. One big problem might be VGM files, but there are plenty of options there even if they're not in the same player.
• Image Editing: Paint Dot Net is so good, and there are no other image editing programs that are as lightweight or as flexible as it. I dread the idea of learning to use the GIMP. I remember looking up how to put a border around text, something I can do with one mouse click in PDN, and...yeah, it's no PDN. (EDIT 11/21/2025: Turns out, GIMP 3 actually added that feature earlier this year; shows how much I didn't want to go back to GIMP!)
• Video Production: Vegas, the program I used to make my intro that I use for my Twitch streams, is Windows only. Shotcut, DaVinci Resolve, and HandBrake can run on Linux.
• Konaste Games: IIDX Infinitas and DDR Grand Prix are Windows only. There does seem to be some fan effort to get those games to run on Linux via Wine, but it's not perfect and it will probably never be unless Konami decides to make them playable on the Steam Deck and accidentally makes them playable on OSes like the Steam Deck. Or, y'know, put them on consoles. I am not holding my breath on that one.
• Music Production: FL Studio may have a Mac OS version, but there's no Linux version. This is a big one, as I use FL Studio to cut songs for Stepmania as well as make songs. It's possible I could use something like Ardour to replace the former, but I have a lot of songs on FL Studio I do not want to lose, I am so used to FL Studio, and I have way too many FLEX packs to give it up.
• BMS Creation: None of the BMS creation tools run on Linux. In fact, all of them are Windows only. Combined with the lack of FL Studio, this is one of the biggest reasons why I cannot give up Windows.

More than likely, I'm going to be installing Bazzite on a PC that already has Windows on it, and I may just make it a dual boot and cross my fingers whatever happened with my old Vaio doesn't happen with this one. It would be the best of both worlds; Windows 11 for music production, BMS, and maybe Konami's famous Bemani series, Bazzite for everything else. Sounds like a good plan for my next PC if my top of the line PC for 2018 finally shows its age.