e573 — Daft Punk Is Playing at My House

Photo by Robert Arnar on Unsplash

Published 2 November 2026

e573 with Michael M and Andy:  stories about Ikea’s Wall of Sound, LEGO’s collab with Daft Punk, decomp and recomp retro games, persuasive games and a whole lot more!

Andy and Michael start things off in a Swedish way, celebrating the fact that Andy was in Sweden just last week, is sporting the blue and yellow colors of the flag, and lean right into the first story from Ikea, whose bluetooth KALLSUP speakers have a feature to link up with one another.  If you want to create a wall of sound with up to 150 of these cubes, you could do so.

The cohosts then shift to the “first computer-generated TV presenter” from 1985: Max Headroom.  You can experience this over at headroom.channel.  Michael accidentally nerd snipes Andy into downloading the Veilamp visualizer.

Then, the team turns to LEGO (as they frequently do) and talk about the collaboration between LEGO and Daft Punk™.  There is a newly approved LEGO Ideas fan creation for a Daft Punk concert, which also sparks an illuminating conversation on the third party light kits available for many of the LEGO builds.

After taking a quick look at the Overgrown browser extension, Andy and Michael turn to the decompilation/recompilation story from the Verge.  With the team’s interest in long term preservation of games – Andy points out that there are specific bugs and behavior that are in the game precisely because of the then-prevalent hardware capabilities.  And is the game the same game, if you “fix” these problems in a new recompiled version of the retro code?  Michael makes a link between these kinds of retro game preservation to business process differentiation while updating to the current level on ERP or other business software.

Then, the cohosts take a look at Permit Pending – a SimCity style building game with a twist.  The twist deals with the player as mayor of the city dealing with all of the zoning, eminent domain, filing fees and more that are all part of construction and development.

Wrapping up the episode, Andy and Michael look at the Tiny Computers app – which is an excellent example to prove the point they both made earlier.

Does the preservation of software through decomp/recomp a net good even if it changes some of the gameplay restrictions from the hardware?  Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz@mastodon.social (our home for now) and let us know!

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