Rewritten Past

After a minor mishap where Mama Yue and Miss Serena did their absolute best to play off the fact that 'absolutely nothing happened,' we returned to our usual schedule of ordinary events.

As much as I would like to just manip- CONVINCE Miss Serena to go around Los Angeles and check out various places, I was, unfortunately, a level grinder at heart.

So, after Mama Yue left for work, I just pulled out my laptop to get to MY work.

Not homework, of course.

Miss Blumgren had already cleared me on all of my work for the rest of the year, basically. Honestly, she had suggested to Mama Yue that I skip a few grades because I wasn't being challenged, but I was NOT about to leave April behind. So I hard vetoed it.

We compromised with me basically being April's private tutor instead.

Win-win.

...Not sure exactly how Mama Yue arranged it. But we'd both come to an unspoken agreement that neither of us dove too deeply on how we managed to make things happen.

I was 99% sure that Mama Yue had a dossier of blackmail on everyone we knew somehow or another and that was how she was pulling things off. That, or she skirted the line in flirting with the older men enough to threaten them with telling their wives.

I was also 99% sure Mama Yue thought that MY stuff came from a survival mindset where being left alone so long had resulted in random violent encounters and a necessity to hone my mind so I didn't die or get trafficked.

And to be honest, fair.

I, uh. Did come across as a hyper competent child genius who could probably get a passport and fly to Europe or Asia alone before disappearing.

Technically true too.

My online side projects were paying pretty well, after all.

But anyway.

Today was just a lazy day in the hotel.

Miss Serena wanted to make sure April kept on track with school, being the proper mother that she was, so they were in the main room going over April's class work.

April, of course, was complaining about wanting to play with me.

And Miss Serena, of course, retorted by saying I wouldn't want to marry a bad girl who didn't do her homework or study.

Needless to say, it worked.

And needless to say, I was very concerned for future me.

But again, future problem.

For now...

"Let's see... Just what can I do on here?"

I turned on my laptop and dug into its programs.

For the most part, I'd been just using it for a word processor and internet, so I didn't check much else yet.

It was a high-end laptop though. A Thinkpad with a little mouse nub in the keyboard. Back at this era, that was super high tech.

...I tried not to think about how minimal that 'high tech' was in comparison to my gaming rig in the future.

Instead, I clicked through the gui to check what it had.

Obviously, it was Windows.

Mac was good, but it was never really good for development until the 2000s.

But anyway, the laptop was running Windows 98. Classic. MS DOS was on there, along with some other things. It had a floppy drive, a CD-Drive, some PS/2 ports...

And MAN weren't those ports a blast from the past.

There was a single USB port too. Must be USB 1.0 or something. But there wasn't really anything that use dUSB yet at this time... I think.

Either way, I didn't have any.

But all of that aside.

The key part was the Microsoft Visual C++ on the laptop. That, and the fact that the laptop was 32-bit. Or rather, the fact that MOST computers were 32-bit in this era.

You see, while I was definitely rusty in my coding, I had B.S. in CompSci and went to Master for AI.

If I couldn't hack together a proper IDE, drivers, and everything I needed, I didn't deserve to have that.

Speaking of drivers.

My capstone project in undergraduate had been to add a kernel level modification to the OS to implement a driver for a periphery like a mouse.

TL;DR, I was about to jump SO many tech levels via raw coding.

Now, there was a problem from the fact that I lacked computational power...

But that was fine.

It just meant that I could have fun devising new optimization strategies and bootstrap the future even further.

Maybe.

Butterfly effect would be craaaaazy in the future. But what was the point of going decades back into the past without trying to bootstrap up to crazy sci-fi tech, right?

I was going to make a real-life Sword Art Online if it was the last thing I did, dammit.

...Okay, maybe not that far. But you get the gist!

First things first though.

I hummed and opened up a text document to start writing up some program specifications. "Let's see... the easiest thing to make at this time would definitely be visual novels, right? That, and RPGs."

Right now, consoles ruled the gaming world. Playstation, Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, along with the handheld Gameboys... Gamers were synonymous with consoles at this time.

If I remembered right, I think EverQuest released around this time too? And there were some PC games like Fallout 2 and Doom. But PCs were very much not for gaming at this time.

But.

"Hm..." I rubbed my chin. "...I could absolutely write some emulators if I got my hands on the tech. But I think it'd be too soon to introduce that."

It was also highly illegal-

Wait, no. I think the landmark case about that didn't even come out yet. It was 2000, I think for that Sony case about reverse engineering a console BIOS.

Which meant it was EXTRA illegal right now.

Hm.

Note to self: either make some friends who will go into law, or go into law yourself and start fucking people up with arguments to change the legal landscape around emulating video games and video games in general.

Starting with barring game companies from patenting game mechanics.

But that's for the future.

For now...

I strummed my fingers across the laptop keyboard and murmured, "I think I can make a game like Princess Maker, right? And while I can't DRAW it yet, I can absolutely do pixel art."

My long high school years in my first life spent rom hacking was about to come in handy-

Huh.

Core memory unlocked.

I wonder how much more I forgot.

But anywho...

"Let's see..."

It was TERRIBLE program logic to use jump statements, but it was useful game event logic.

If I split up the game states properly, it should neatly slot in.

"Hm... We need a class to store save data. JSON doesn't exist yet, but I can just recreate it ahead of time as a struct. It's just syntax, anyway. Next, we need the basic game loop. Let's set a bigger day loop, then a three phase morning, afternoon, evening loop for events... Then we need a stat block..."

I hummed and started writing the specifications for my game. "Hm... I don't want to take too much away from Princess Maker. But I guess isekai isn't too popular yet. Might as well jumpstart the genre. Let's make this... Hero Maker- No, Hero Creator. Yeah."