This is an interesting point. It makes me wonder what unmarried people did, though. I suppose if you stayed with family, your mother would go to the shops. Did young people not used to live on their own as commonly?

This can be fixed yourself, whether that's hopping into a TTY or having to boot a live environment and chroot in. You aren't at the mercy of some major company's support people.

Even without fixing it you should be able to get at the files on the drive for use on another machine, or backing them up if you're gonna reinstall.

Vim on the other hand never felt like it benefited much from a GUI, or like it had a very good one available. I just use neovim in a terminal.

Recently I was trying to find a good way to delete from the current position backward to another character, like dT or dF followed by the target character. The trouble was they'd leave at least one character behind, either what I jumped to or what I started on. What worked how I want, and was still easy, was just using visual mode. Where "n" was the character to jump back to, I did vFn which selected from my cursor position back to the letter n (and including that n). I could then hit d and delete all of it, no extra character left behind from either end. I remember at first I was thinking "there's gotta be a way to do this without visual mode". Best I could come up with was hitting x after dFn or whatever to get the stray character. I think using visual mode is probably fine, though. Maybe if I were doing this type of edit a lot I could bind some key sequence to do it.

Would it be accurate to say you didn't use visual mode much in vim before you moved to Helix?

I have never used sandpaper on electronics, but I perhaps similarly use a fiberglass pen. Total game changer for getting old cartridge pins to read again for SNES and GBA games and such. Highly recommend picking one up.

For games without controller support or where KB+M has an advantage, the trackpads are a game changer. Imagine a hotbar like in Minecraft or Terraria, but instead of having to go left or right one at a time with your bumpers, you could spawn a radial menu with the touchpad and instantly flick to "8" or "5" or "1" to select those slots.

The software around controllers is universally bad, and Valve is the first to really try to fix it. We need a successor to XInput that is less limited.

I don't have a specific cart dumper to recommend from experience, I have dumped GB/GBC/GBA games but not SNES. A quick search found some options, though.

https://github.com/X-death25/SNES_Dumper

https://stoneagegamer.com/retrode-2.html

Also found some discussion here recommending the Sanni Cart Reader, but it's a 5 year old thread so there are likely cheaper or better options.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Roms/comments/obrxg3/best_nessnesn6...

That being said, I do not think there is really an ethical problem with grabbing someone else's cart dumps, whether you have a cart of your own or not, and legally I would be very surprised if you had any issues in the US at least. The coolest part about cart dumpers to me is for carts with save files, you can "rescue" them from the hardware and preserve your progress. In some cases the save relies on a battery that could go dead at any time.

If you do end up collecting physical cartridges, I would also encourage you to get the actual console, and explore mods for it, get the best video signal out of it you can (RGB or component rather than composite). Playing on real hardware is cool. I'd also recommend getting a flashcart even if you do collect original cartridges, so you can try out homebrew, romhacks, fan translations, and ports. There's a guy who has been porting NES games to SNES.

https://archive.org/details/@infidelity