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Arcan: 10 Years of Online Obscurity

Posted on June 2, 2026 by bjornstahl

… and 23 years of tedious yak shaving.

Ten years ago my rather anemic post on the Arcan project started to circulate. It got enough attention that I considered stopping right there and then. I do not care much for attention; most of my other open source work has been anonymous or with throwaway handles, and I still regularly run into reflections of my previous misdeeds.

To mourn the occasion, it seems appropriate to pen down some of the history before I manage to repress it entirely. For this round I will omit the funding story; the commercial projects it has been hiding inside; the start-up close calls or that one time the gang nearly sold out to a VC.

Even 10 years ago the project had been open and around for several years, masquerading as a ‘frontend’ for DIY arcade cabinets, but we will get back to that in a little bit.

The actual story starts around 2003. At that point I was mostly ‘done’ with the programming ‘languages’ part of the computing journey — it is the single most boring topic I can think of; the joy is in the music, not the sheet notes. When thinking of something to compose, I was struck by a nasty and incurable case of ‘oscilloscope envy’.

While the cool electronics kids could attach a probe here and there and see some of the circuitry in action, us computing folks were still stuck with caveman style ‘print’ logging or the chainsaw assisted surgery that is symbolic debuggers. I wanted to hear, feel and see the computing machinery as it spun the information weave.

If something like that is even possible, it would take rather precise control of the visual, the aural and the tactile so that what you sample and represent is what you intended to. That takes wrestling some of the worst companies in tech history. But you need to start carving out your space somewhere, so I blew the dust from the old von Clausewitz and sketched out a plan.

First of all, I surely lacked the proper skills. Those should be acquired somehow. You don’t know what you don’t know and all that, and ideas are a dime a dozen. Get to building the thing to see where and why it is flawed. Answers lie in calluses, not in prompts.

The plan was to setup a diary project to chronicle this caving expedition and split it up into three phases. At each transition, evaluate if it is still worth going, or if I should cut my losses and do something less irresponsible.

Each phase should have a handful of actual applications that filled some personal need for more grounded projects. Waypoints of sorts to avoid losing track and burning out as well as a ‘ok this was dumb, but at least I got a t-shirt’ defense mechanism against the sunken cost fallacy.

Being a diary also meant jotting down other parts of the experience, such as loves gained and lives lost. It turned out to be many more of the latter. Every time there is a release post it means someone died, with one or more tributes hidden inside.

The three phases are ‘Fun and Games’ (Arkanoid), ‘Challenge the Established Order’ (Arcane) and ‘Asylum’ (Arkham). Smash them together and you get Arcan.

Sidequest

To remedy the skill situation, and postpone the whole ‘growing up’ thing, I sought sagely advise. As bad luck would have it, I got an audience with the local bigwig CS professor; a bearded fellow of some repute with an unrequited love for mathematics and a nose for systems thinking.

After some back and forth we agreed that it would be best (but perhaps not for me) if I took aim for the whole PhD thing. He just so happened to have funding for that in the pipeline. Not the whole debugging thing, heavens no. That is something for people with dirt under their nails, not chalk. But debugging is basically security, if you squint a little, and that is a lot easier to fund.

Monitoring and surveillance are two sides of the same security coin, and power grids do love some monitoring as part of the SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) acronym. This was basically corporate IT security but constantly 15-20 years behind the times.

Smart Micro Grids were to become all the research-rage and to be built from COTS (Common, Off The Shelf) components from dubious sources of surely compromised supply-chains. It also implied turning the whole thing inside out, and monitoring all of that was much closer to what I was looking for anyhow, so fine, that will be the research target.

There is a lot more to this tangent that we do not have the time for, nor could I handle the blood alcohol levels necessary to revisit those memories, so lets move on to something more playful.

Phase One – Fun and Games

The point of this phase was to establish the necessary groundwork – Media Processing Pipeline,...