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What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI
Some observations from my War of the Lancehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WaroftheLance%28videogame%29 1989 Code Harness assisted modernisation WIP I gave Qwen-3....
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
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Amiga Screens: A Primer
One of the unwritten rules of the Internet seems to be that whenever something Amiga-related is mentioned, at least one Amiga fan (myself included) must show up and try to explain the concept of screens . Amiga screens can have different resolutions, we'll tell you, and one can drag them, we'll say, and other Amiga…
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Apple Copland D11E4 Booting in the Browser
Apple’s ill-fated Copland operating system is notoriously hard to run on real hardware, and has not previously been available in emulation. Here is the last build, D11E4 from June 1996, in an improved DingusPPC.
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How video games inspire great UX (2019)
This quote is meaningful to me as I’ve often struggled with a problem until an insight from a user test “changed my perspective”.
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Divide by depth for instant 3D
When I first started working on games, I used high level frameworks that would give you a Camera that just kind of worked. But as I learned more and wanted t...
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The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art (2024)
A follow-up to this text is available here . It goes into much greater detail about signal quality, and also examines how pixel art techniques have been used on non-CRT systems.
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The Lamentable Later Life of Lemmings
For a while there in the early 1990s, there seemed to be good reason to believe that Lemmings was on its way to becoming one of gaming’s perennial franchises. Developed by DMA Design of Dundee, Scotland, the original Lemmings game took the world by storm upon its release in 1991. From its first home on the Commodore…
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A custom virtual machine for the Stars 4X game
Stars! is a 1995 4X game (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) for 16-bit Windows 3.1 that I first played ~28 years ago. While Windows is famously backwards compatible, it’s notoriously difficult to play Stars! today. Windows x64 cannot run 16-bit applications, and playing requires either retro hardware or emulation…
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Anatomy of a Texture
A step-by-step guide to modern texture memory layout
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When the fractional part of a float fixes your shader
A write-up of a full shader debugging session to find out why my Voronoi Diagram shader was stuttering in one specific machine.
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Recreating Voodoo Graphics and a Late-1990s Gaming PC on an FPGA
I've spent the last month adding features and improving performance in z486_MiSTer , mostly working through games from the first half of the 1990s. Looking a few years ahead brought me to another change I wanted to explore: the arrival of 3D graphics cards.
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Lucasart's Afterlife
I can hardly believe I’m writing a blog post about a game that came out 27 years ago, but here we are. Lucasfilm, at one time had a gaming subsidiary called Lucasarts, and they produced somet…
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Reversing Factorio's RNG
This post details how Factorio's random number generation works, how it can be reversed and how I used that knowledge to predict and manipulate the RNG with pure in‑game mechanics.
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ZX Spectrum: Experimenting with 1-Bit Sound
As part of the ZX Spectrum tour, I implemented some routines that would let you play simple tones out of the 1-bit beeper. These were in large part inspired by earlier work I did on the Apple II. W…
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Inverse Kinematics and Foot Locking
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
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The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)
Ok it’s not exactly $60 but you can get the board itself for that amount of money on eBay if you’re lucky, but on average the price is around $70-$100 (as of November 2025) which is still very cheap considering you can play Cyberpunk 2077 on this.
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Sony makes bold claim about game ownership
Sony would like you to know that any reasonable gamer would know that purchasing a game is just licensing a game (Video Games Chronicle), not owning it. And there is truth mixed in with a bold-face…
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Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly
Babylonian Twins is an Amiga platformer I built in Baghdad in 1993, in 68000 assembly. This summer an LLM ported it to Godot, and this is what I found when I read back through what it did. The original disks are now free on itch.io.
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Unusual Suspects
Sketch the suspect from witness testimony
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2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
In 2004 I played too much RuneScape on a 56k modem that died the moment Mum picked up the phone. A 3D world, up to a couple of thousand players on a server, dozens on screen at once - in the browser, on 5 kilobytes per second. It worked. Let’s follow a single step and see how.
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Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days
The original Snowboard Kids has been fully decompiled in only 84 days! In this post I delve into what changed and what lessons might apply to future projects.
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Curvature Beziers: Improving on a timeless recipe
Improving on a timeless recipe
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I built a low-latency AI companion that plays Skyrim with me
How Varkos was built: a low-latency AI companion that plays Skyrim with you, follows complex instructions and evolves through shared experiences.
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Sol loves to cheat
Adventures in harness engineering
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Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
In the mid-90s the coolest thing to buy for a PC, besides the incredibly expensive Intel Pentium , was a CD-ROM drive . With their capacity of 640 MiB (three times the storage of PC HDD at the time), CDs allowed enthusiasts to step into a world of multimedia, made of high-resolution 640x480 256 colors palette-indexed…
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Differential Heuristics
In 2005 Google showed off Google Maps, which lets you drag the map around instead of reloading the page like MapQuest and others used. That’s the feature that got everyone’s attention. But what got my attention was a feature they added in 2007 where you could drag the start/end points on a route [1] , and it would…
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Super Mario Derivations
One of the most surprising aspects of the Nix language is that it is lazy, especially if you have never used a lazy language before. This laziness is what makes much of Nixpkgs possible, and its complexity.
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The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing
Appreciating typography is a study in paradox. The primary goal of well-designed typography is to help you read the words, not appreciate how the words are comp
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Painting with Gaussians
Dmitri's blog about programming, Clojure, and software development