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The limits of "computational photography"
I was recently discussing laser etching with an engineer/font-designer friend of mine, and I wanted to show him a picture of some really good laser etching on a particular piece of optical equipment.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
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Will Wright on designing user interfaces to simulation games (1996)
A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked…
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Here be four bits of dragons: the Mattel D&D Computer Game and the TMS1100
When my parents sold the house and moved to the great white north, they dropped off a few boxes of my stuff that was still in the garage. ...
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The Galaga no-fire-cheat mystery (2012)
My personal website and blog
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A Perceptually Meaningful Audio Visualizer (2016)
Audioscope: What you see is what you hear.
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Minimal Cross-Platform Graphics
Exploring how to use 2D graphics in various desktop operating systems, the old-school way. In this part we learn how to create an empty window under Linux, macOS and Windows.
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Common Lisp and Music Composition
Once upon a time, there were many music composition software packages, mostly written in Common LISP. To name a few I know, Common Music, Symbolic Composer (not related to the Symbolics Lisp Machine). Common Music is still available in source code but I doubt if anyone is still able to setup that. Symbolic Composer…
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Remastering Colin McRae Rally 3 with SilentPatch
A fresh take on the classic rally game with widescreen support, high definition UI, and countless bug fixes.
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Sierra’s Macintosh Timebomb (2021)
On Saturday, September 18 1993, Sierra's Macintosh games stopped working. Franchises froze as King's Quests, Space Quests, and even the Leisurely Suited Larries locked up. Practically every Mac SCI game had broken overnight. Sierra developed a patch within nine days, released it on their BBS, and announced it in their…
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How Microsoft attempted to make the Xbox 360 dashboard load faster
The October 2012 Xbox 360 dashboard update moved the dashboard from the nand flash to the hard-drive. Does it make a difference?
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Tetris is capable of universal computation
This text presents a method for embedding a programmable, general-purpose, digital computer into Tetris. It describes the capabilities and performance of an implementation that runs Tetris on Tetris.
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High level mods/patches for console video games
This blogpost explores my journey of bringing higher level languages (in this case C) to console video-game modding, as an alternative to hand-tailored assembly mods.
763
SDL2 common mistakes and how to avoid them
SDL has grown on me over the past year. I didn’t understand its value until viewing it in the right lens: as a complete platform and runtime replacing the host’s runtime, possibly including libc. Ideally an SDL application links exclusively against SDL and otherwise not directly against host libraries, though in…
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When is a PC not a PC? The PC-98
I’ve covered PC compatibility in the past, and tried to explain how just having an x86 CPU and running DOS does not necessarily make your machine compatible with an IBM PC. At the time, this …
765
The beauty of CGI and simple design
Finding someone still singing CGIs praises is surprising, and some alliteration.
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Perfect Circle
How good are your circle drawing skills?
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Meta Quest Pro – Bad AR Passthrough
Introduction I have been taking pictures and making short video clips to demonstrate different aspects of the displays and optics of the Meta Quest Pro (MQP) for over a month. It was a bit of an on…
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Remaking old computer graphics with AI image generation
Can AI Image generation tools make re-imagined, higher-resolution versions of old video game graphics? Over the last few days, I used AI image generation to reproduce one of my childhood nightmares. I wrestled with Stable Diffusion, Dall-E and Midjourney to see how these commercial AI generation tools can help retell…
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I did Advent of Code on a Playstation
How far can I get in Advent of Code if I do all the problems in Dreams?
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Brute Force Colors
Using modern brute force approach to improve image quality on retro computers, by Arnaud Carré
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Stranger Things and the Amiga 1000
About a year ago, I cancelled my Netflix subscription. One of the few shows listed on the "plus" side when I made my decision was Stranger Things: an entertaining series with an excellent first and good second season. In short, I'm a fan of the show - though my appreciation of it doesn't come near my fanatical passion…
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Can Doom Run It? An Adding Machine in Doom
For decades, we've asked ourselves "Can it run Doom?". Now we can finally make the ultimate punchline: "Can Doom run it?"
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How Pitfall builds its world (2021)
Games for the Atari 2600 were quite constrained. When Warren Robinett first pitched the idea that would become Adventure , a game where you would explore a world with many rooms and pick up items to help you along the way, he was denied because it wasn't thought feasible. And it made sense to do so. This was the late…
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There oughta be a Game Boy capture cartridge
I present to you: The GB Interceptor. It is an adapter that goes between an unmodified Game Boy and the cartridge and offers a video stream of the game via USB. Click the image to see the video on youtube.com. The video above should give you a good overview of what it does, how it works and what its limitations are…
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A trip through the Graphics Pipeline
Welcome. This is the index page for a series of blog posts I’m currently writing about the D3D/OpenGL graphics pipelines as actually implemented by GPUs. A lot of this is well known among gra…
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VR robots are building railways in Japan
Could VR-powered humanoid robots be the future of heavy construction? Over the years we’ve seen a number of major corporations try their hands at marrying VR technology and robotics, from VR convenience store employees and a remote-controlled bomb squad bot to a rather unsettling headset that uses a robotic arm to…
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A Christmas tree bauble that plays Doom
Christmas is coming again, and generally that means christmas trees and everything in it: lights, streamers, and ofcourse baubles. The holiday is all very jolly and everything, so I decided it was lacking some doom... errm, I mean Doom. So I 3d-printed a small Christmas bauble modeled on an IBM PC, stuffed it with the…
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I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you
In which I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft… and give it to you.
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Activision’s faulty anti-cheat software
Activision’s blind faith in the infallibility of their RICOCHET anti-cheat software , combined with a buggy and unstable Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II release, has resulted in faulty, permanent, and unappealable player account bans that prevent users from starting even the single-player game. These bans leave…
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A new AI game: Give me ideas for crimes to do
Less than a week ago OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world, and it kicked off what feels like a seismic shift in many people’s understand of the capabilities of large …