the SidecarT turns three
Three years. Give or take.
I built the first one because I wanted one and nobody else was going to make it. Soldered it at this same desk, in this same chair. It was ugly and it worked. I was happy and that was enough.
This isn’t about the company. I don’t want to talk about the company. This isn’t about the board. I don’t want to talk about the board. This is about me.
I usually write these in December. Late. Like a man paying a bill he forgot about. This one comes in July because I couldn’t wait that long. Something needed to come out.
Last year I wrote that I was scared I’d “lost a bit the fun for the simple fact of having fun.” Cute line. I should have read it as a diagnosis. I didn’t.
the hands, the chair, the screen
Let me say it flat.
These were the worst months since I started. Not the factory. Not a lost shipment. Not the recycling bureaucrats, though they were there too, the way roaches are always there. It was me. I ran dry.
The hands went first. Same fingers as last year, except this time I couldn’t blame Black Friday. Then the kind of tired that sleep won’t touch. You sleep eight hours and wake up owing more.
Then the bad part. I’d sit down at the bench, in front of the machines I love, holding a board I was excited about a month ago, and feel nothing. Flat. A dead battery in a warm case.
I’d open the inbox and my chest would go tight before I read a word. Not because you people are cruel. Most of you are decent, better than I deserve. But every message was one more thing, and I was out of things to give. I started ducking the very people this whole mess exists for.
That’s the tell. When you start hiding from the good part, you’re not busy. You’re done for a while.
Nobody made me do this. I built the cage myself. Slowly. With love. One solder joint at a time. Somehow that’s worse.
november, 2025
I could have carried the weight. I’d carried it before.
What I couldn’t carry started last November.
It started as noise online. A handful of loud people decided I was the problem and said so in public, blaming me for things I hadn’t built and couldn’t fix. It moved to the Discord. Then to videos. First about me. Then, when that got old, about the work.
I still don’t understand it. That’s the part that ate me. You can fight a bug. You can argue with a bad review. You can even laugh at a scammer. But how do you answer a stranger who woke up one day and picked you? I make little boards for old computers. That’s the whole crime.
Here’s how I’m built. A problem at work, a real one, I’ll sit across from you and argue it out until we find the fix. That’s the job. That’s professional. I can do that all day.
But come at me personally? Sorry, bro. I was raised to stand up and swing back. The first punch to the face hurts. The ones after it don’t. You keep your feet and you keep going.
So I stood there and I took it. Thick skin. Thirty years in this industry. I’d stood in worse rooms than a comment section.
But this one had no bell. No face across the table. Just weeks. Then months. Hits coming out of the dark from people I’d never met. I never found out who they were, or where they crawled in from. I’ve got a rough idea.
And one morning I noticed I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hands or the hours. I wasn’t hurt anymore. I was fed up. Worn flat by something I couldn’t name and couldn’t end.
That was the drop that made the glass overflow.
the pile got too big
Because the glass was already full. It had been for a while.
I was proud last year. Wrote that this had become “a small planet with gravity.” Nice line. What I didn’t notice is that I was one of the rocks getting pulled in.
Atari. Amiga. TOS emulators. Power supplies. Keyboard boards. Video adapters. Every one of them real. Every one of them hungry. Firmware, docs, a launch, and then support that never dies, it just changes its name.
Ten good ideas don’t add. They multiply. And there’s one of me. Two hands. Both tired.
Turns out you can get buried by the things that went right.
the machine still works
And then there’s the board itself.
Three years old. Third revision. Smaller, quieter, meaner than the ugly thing I first jammed into a cartridge port. Twelve apps. Wi-Fi. A microSD slot. Updates over the air, so I never have to send you hunting for a file again. And MIDI over IP bolted onto it, which is exactly the kind of beautiful, useless-until-it-isn’t trick that dragged me into this scene in the first place.
There are more of these things out in the world than I ever thought when I was making that first one suffer.
And every so often, on a bad night, one of you sends a photo. A game from your childhood booting off a SidecarT in a machine older than my career. And the knot in my chest lets go for a minute.
That’s the lie burnout tells you. That the work stopped mattering. It didn’t. The board does exactly what I promised it would. I was the part that broke. Not it.
slowing down. not stopping.
So I’m changing how I do this. Not to quit. So I don’t have to.
Fewer things at once. Fewer promises with dates stapled to them. My hands will spend their good hours on the work only I can do. Some projects crawl now. One or two sit in the dark and wait. I’ll ship less and still be breathing next year, instead of burning the place down to prove I could carry it alone.
If I take longer to answer, that’s why. I didn’t stop caring. I just worked out, at fifty-something, that caring and vanishing aren’t the same thing, no matter how alike they look from the inside.
still here
Here’s the only part that matters, so I’ll keep it short.
I’m not going anywhere. The SidecarT isn’t going anywhere.
The board that started all of this is three years old and harder than it’s ever been. Still the most fun I’ve ever had with a soldering iron. I’m tired. I’m not lying about it. And I’m still at the bench. The updates keep coming. The boards keep shipping. Slower. Steadier. Still mine.
But I am walking out of a room for a while.
I’m stepping back from the Atari community. Not the machine. The machine never did a thing to me. I need air.
Every scene like this grows its own little kingdoms. Self-crowned popes. Blessings and curses out of forum posts. Push the door open on one of those courts and the smell hits you before anything else. Rotten fish. Old, self-important, left too long in the dark.
I’ve had enough of the smell. So I’ll go breathe somewhere else for a while. New machines. New platforms. Rooms where other crowned popes of dead computers will not consider me important enough to judge me thumbs down.
The board stays. The work stays. I’m just taking it out to fresher air.
It was love at first byte. I just had to crawl back to remember it.
Now leave me alone. I’ve got a board to flash.