Frank Chiarulli,
Sophie Downward,
Rose Hall
The RCade is a custom arcade cabinet built at the Recurse Center that runs games made by the community. It has a real CRT, a custom graphics card, spinner controllers, and a deploy pipeline where anyone can ship a game just by pushing to GitHub. It now has over 90 games. Frank Chiarulli will talk about reviving the hardware and building the deployment system, Rose Hall will cover the game engine and plugin sandbox, and Sophie Downward will walk through building a custom display adapter from scratch. They’ll close out by showing off some of the games.
Friday 1200 Grand Ballroom
Frank Chiarulli (KD2UIW) is a software engineer and artist in Brooklyn who works on privacy, security, and open-source tools, happiest somewhere between the kernel and the network card but often finding himself all the way up the stack. He runs his own ASN, and past lives include the Recurse Center, privacy startups, B2B SaaS, and a big bank he doesn’ t talk about. He also makes sculpture, photography, and installations, and is of the opinion that an enclosure is an open invitation.
Sophie Downward is a catgirl hacker based in NYC. She can often be found sticking Nix where it doesn’ t belong, programming on the subway, or bending transistors to her sheer will. She fiddles with all levels of the stack, from writing Ruby on Rails code (professionally, and for fun) to developing her own custom hardware and firmware.
Rose Hall is an engineer currently at the Recurse Center in New York who builds infrastructure to enable others’ ambitions across whatever part of the stack is needed, from ARM firmware to community-facing apps. They’ve reverse engineered embedded systems, built tools that disappear into the walls, and founded their first company at 16. They care most about making the people near them more capable - and more dangerous.
