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Fable 5.2 one-shotted my nephew's dream game
LLMs can make complete multi-level games that are fun.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
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Deus Ex
A slight shift of focus, and the future could still turn out like Deus Ex after all…
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Obscure audio codec is a perfect fit for the N64
Sorry for the clickbait title. I promise this post delivers: 44100 Hz stereo with near-Opus bitrates using about 4% of the N64’s CPU time.
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Being a kid making games in the early 2000s
An autobiographical essay by Jay Tholen about being a youngster making games and posting them online!
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Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Kasparov in 1996?
A fun experiment where I back-port all the improvements we've made to chess engines over the last 30 years and run it on a 1996 Pentium Pro to see what we could have done if only we knew more at the time.
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GPT-5.6 Sol can beat Factorio on peaceful mode
Edit: Woah, this took off! If you want more details you can subscribe at the bottom of the post or on YouTube. I’m working on a more detailed highlights/commentary post and video. Previously: We got Claude Code playing Factorio, Towards beating Factorio autonomously, and Faketorio: an agent testbed I got GPT-5.6 Sol…
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Infinite Mac: BeOS
tl;dr: You can now run many BeOS versions in the browser at Infinite Mac , my site where you can experience the Macintosh Cinematic Universe from 1984 to 2005. The installs are full peers to their Mac cousins: you can boot them instantly (large disks are streamed in), play around with pre-installed software from…
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Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World
How a 2001 business sim rendered its rich and detailed cities.
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Growing Trees
Growing procedural trees through competition for light: buds, resource allocation, shoot direction, and branch shedding.
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How to run a city builder on 16 MHz
Do you feel spoiled by modern hardware? I know I do. Even the cheapest CPUs have at least 4 cores nowadays, running billions of operations per second. The idea that you could run any software on le…
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Jailbreaking the Switch 2
ns2jb is a software-only, tethered jailbreak for the Switch 2. It allows running arbitrary native code as any ordinary sysmodule, and as the built-in fs sysmodule. This lets us run homebrew, reverse engineer and mod Switch 2 games, back up save files off the Switch, and access most of the Switch 2’s peripherals…
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Dungeon generation in the Gnomish mines of NetHack
Ok, this one is really best explained with a visualiser:
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Way to Play Super Mario 64: On Apple Vision Pro
Super Mario 64 becomes a living diorama on Apple Vision Pro. Each level sits on your real table, and you walk around it while you play with a game controller. You are the camera: lean in for a closer look, or step around the table to see Mario from any side.
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Rendering pretty sky in Around The World game
In the last post, I got the game’s clouds to look passable. But after looking at it during playtesting, I still wasn’t satisfied with the way the overall picture of how sea, sky and clouds came together. With some small tweaks, things started to look a lot better.
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I love software rendering
Sharp pixels, gritty colour banding, and DOS games running at resolutions their own era couldn’t manage. Why I still prefer the software renderer, and why it needs a fast PC.
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AI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary
AI is now able to decompile games and software in a matter of days. That's scary... but kind of exciting.
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How to engineer an AI harness for game development
Exploring practical ways to make your game more legible to AI agents and how to make agentic iteration faster.
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LittleJS is 2D and 3D now
LittleJS just got the biggest update since it launched! It is still the small, fast, dependency-free HTML5 game engine it always was. Now it also has a full 3D renderer sharing the canvas with your…
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The Origin Story of Kid Pix
The history of Kid Pix by Craig Hickman
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Writing a Demoscene Intro for the ZX Spectrum
In the late 80s, I spent an embarrassing number of hours hunched over my ZX Spectrum, typing in Sinclair BASIC programs and rudimentary assembler routines copied from magazines, trying to re-create the Amiga crack intros I’d seen round at a friend’s house. Obviously, they never came even slightly close - but now, many…
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500B tokens later: Letting AI agents decompile a first-person shooter
During the last 3 months, I spent some of my time and tokens decompiling a popular first-person shooter. The goal was not to reach a simple proof-of-concept state. Instead, we really wanted an accurate, stable and feature-complete recreation of the game. The avid reader of my blog might have noticed that I had…
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Getting old Macromedia Director Games to run on modern Hardware
How I got many of my childhood games running again after fighting with old Copy-Protection mechanisms
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2D Vehicles
Explore my 1996 vehicle physics prototype, recreated for the web as Motion Lab.
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City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2
Despite my disappointment with Cities: Skylines 2, I keep coming back to the game from time to time. I can't even control it. It's like a deep inner need....
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Infidel goes wild
Planetfall was yesterday's public release, but of course I've spent the past few weeks concentrating on Infidel. A couple of days I came across the most egregious bug I've yet seen in an Infocom game. This bug is extremely difficult to detect ...
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Solving Factorio Quality
I play Factorio the normal way: by writing matrix math code to plan the factory.
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Software occlusion culling in Block Game
My GPU is the integrated Radeon Vega 8 that comes with my AMD Ryzen 7 5700G CPU. I tell you this so you know that my workstation is not a graphical computing powerhouse. It is, in fact, quite weak. To its credit my integrated GPU shows up as 48% faster on UserBenchmark than the GPU in my low end hardware target; a…