Devlog: Playlist Trials, Visualizer Thrills & The Scriptkiddie Saga

Mixed Tape Progress

• Playlists/Favorites/Recents got real data structures plus inline controls. You can star tracks, queue 35+ SID bangers, and their state survives restarts.
• Inline SID Player now exposes playTrackAtIndex, auto-advance detection, and a calm error UI when HVSC fetches misbehave.
• Visualizer Suite finally landed: Spectrum bars, Oscilloscope trace, Voice meters, and Filter curves. Auto-rotate keeps it breathing; toggles let you camp on a favorite mode.
• UX polish: disable states, tooltips, “Press play to visualize” hint, and branding showcase integration so the entire shell feels FutureVision-native.

Development Hell Anecdote 😂

We spent an entire evening trapped in SID-player purgatory: “Stop” would relaunch tracks, “Next” needed two clicks, and auto-advance kept wiping the playlist. Logs everywhere, coffee everywhere, zero progress.

Turns out our unpaid scriptkiddie intern (yes, the enthusiastic one) had quietly been running command-line search/replace scripts to “speed up” edits. PowerShell + template literals + copy/paste = duplicated components and missing braces. The inline player was being recreated on every render because those scripts mangled state hooks. After several hours of “why is this file duplicated AGAIN,” we discovered his “optimization,” issued a very stern reprimand, and banned script-based patching.

But here’s the punchline: playlist auto-advance, the Favorites system, and the visualizer concept were all his ideas. So after the scolding, we forgave him. The kid’s chaos keeps paying off. 😜

What’s Next

• Finish tightening Stop/Next/Prev semantics (no more “double-click to advance” nonsense).
• Register custom React Flow nodes so the template loader doesn’t spam error #003.
• Expose Oscar64 + VICE detection results in the script editor buttons.
• Parse /public/charsets filenames to fuel a font picker with metadata badges.

Thanks for following the journey! Hit that Follow button to catch the next drop—playlist stability fix + font metadata is coming up next. 🎛️