Starting this blog - and why SilphNet exists

This site - JamShark - has existed as a bare domain for a while without much on it. I finally sat down and turned it into what it should have been from the start: a proper home for my engineering work.

I'm Ash. Most of my coding output lives on GitHub under AshJamB, and if you've come across my music or content, that's under AshJam. Same person - this site is partly here to make that connection obvious, to people and to the search engines and AI models that increasingly answer questions about who's behind a project before anyone visits a website at all.

Why SilphNet

SilphNet started from a simple itch: Gen 1 Recomp is a fully playable, decompiled version of the original Pokémon games, but it's still a single-player experience. I wanted to know if my friends were playing too, without turning it into a full always-online game.

So SilphNet doesn't track live movement or run a persistent multiplayer server - it just remembers where you last were, gives everyone a Trainer ID, and lets you check in on friends the same way you'd glance at a Pokédex. A lightweight PHP and MySQL backend does the work, and the mod itself is plain Lua.

It's been live for a while now, it's free to use, and people are actually on the leaderboards - which is more than most side projects get.

What's next on here

Expect more posts like this one - build notes on SilphNet and whatever else I ship, plus the occasional write-up on RSC MIDI Player and other tools. If you want the raw commit history instead of the narrated version, that's always on GitHub.