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October 2026

New chiptunes from Beatscribe​

October 30 jamdac roms

Two original songs by Beatscribe in the ROM Gallery! Both songs were composed using Hybrix Studio, then packaged into a simple ROM cartridge that shows a graphic while playing the chiptune:

Click to see it run!
Click to see it run!

Along the way we made some Jamdac improvements:

  • Fixed a Studio issue where song tempo changes were not saved correctly.
  • When exporting a chiptune, the album art now uses the first sprite from the Studio project (not the last one).
  • Fixed some CSS issues for Jamdac Jukebox.
  • In the Jamdac file format, a release_year of 0 now indicates an unknown release year. This is useful for converting or repackaging songs whose original release date cannot be determined.

Handmade Network Beta Week​

October 28 community

Handmade Network Beta Week, November 16 to 22, 2026

The Handmade Network's Beta Week runs from November 16 to 22. It's an event where volunteers test projects made by the Handmade community, which can be anything, even a commercial project.

Hybrix was accepted as one of this year's projects! We're excited to get some help with testing, and more importantly to support people who celebrate coding as a craft, not just a means to an end. Check out the other submissions, some of them are really creative!

Bounce Brix tutorial refresh​

October 22 tutorials

Bounce Brix is our main walkthrough of Hybrix Studio features, but a lot of its screenshots no longer reflected recent improvements to Hybrix Studio. This month we went through every exercise, checking each step and rebuilding the game from scratch. This involved updating 112 images total. We also clarified some of the explanations and added new tips like SHIFT+click for the eyedropper tool.

New Chombit Chess art​

October 20 chess

ZaniPixels improved the mouse pointer for Chombit Chess. Instead of a cartoony arrow, it's now a gloved hand:

New mouse pointer sprites for Chombit Chess

Try it out in the Gallery:

Click to see it run!

Backlog fixes​

October 13 studio

Some small fixes this week including:

  • A bug where a project didn't load properly after deleting a tileset that was still referenced by a tilemap.
  • Newly created projects now scroll into view on the Studio "Projects" screen; this resolves a minor annoyance for people with lots of projects.
  • Improved error reporting for network issues such as unstable WiFi.
  • Studio's ROM cartridge export now uses the lzma1 library (replacing LZMA-JS). Compression is much faster, which may enable smaller ROMs in the future!

ROM cartridge validation​

October 6 roms

The ROM player now checks cartridge files more strictly:

  • "Zip bomb" ROMs, whose compressed data expands to an enormous size, are rejected.
  • Truncated data now fails with a "truncated input" error, instead of decoding garbage.
  • Data beyond its declared size is rejected.
  • Empty data now decodes correctly.
  • Fixed a bug where loading progress could be reported as negative.

We also clarified the ROM region docs, which didn't clearly explain the difference between LZMA maximum size vs ROM region size.

License continuity​

October 2 shop studio

Last month we mentioned that we were working on improving the license guarantee of "five years" of online service. The October 2nd updated Terms of Service now say that if a version of Hybrix Studio you purchased ever becomes unavailable, we'll restore your access or else provide an installer or source release so you have a way to run it.