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Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE
Chess, card games, and Lua.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 199 posts.
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I wrote a Game Boy Advance game in Zig
The Game Boy Advance is an interesting game console. It has a modern-style CPU (32-bit ARM, lots of registers), but uses an old-fashioned tile based renderer like how the NES did it in the 80s. Don’t get me wrong, since its one of Nintendo’s last tile-based systems, they took the idea as far as it can go with fancy…
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Finding and exploiting hidden features of Animal Crossing's NES emulator (2018)
While looking for ways to activate the developer menus left over in Animal Crossing, including the NES emulator game selection menu, I found an interesting feature that exists in the original game that was always active, but never used by Nintendo. In addition to the NES/Famicom games that can be obtained in-game, it…
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Penrose Mazes (2020)
Mazes are typically constructed on regular grids: square, triangular, hexagonal, etc. But what if you generate a maze on top of a Penrose tiling, which is guaranteed to be irregular? (It is an aperiodic tiling .) The resulting mazes have a very characteristic appearance: they are filled with circles and stars, but the…
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Learning Solver Design: Automating Factorio Balancers
I built a Factorio belt balancer solver. From tiny 2x2 grids to a massive 16x16 monster, every step revealed new solver tricks, numeric hiccups, and devious debugging puzzles.
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1584 LAN party photos from 1996 – 2010 from Australia's island state archived
In July 2023 I was reminiscing about a thing of the past, large-scale public LAN parties. I remember them being a semiregular occurrence around Tasmania, only attending a couple in my young age before they disappeared. I wondered if I could find some photos of these events to help the memories come back clearer. After…
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Lou's Pseudo 3D Page (2013)
Previous update: An explanation of 3d projection mathematics (under Road Basics) and analysis of Activision's Enduro (under Case Studies)! Thanks to everyone for all the e-mail! Keep it coming :) Sorry, I can't answer questions about when I'll post source code, but I'm always happy to answer anything else about these…
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Advent of Code on the Nintendo DS
Solving AoC on the DS with Rust.
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Reverse engineering the Sega Channel game image file format
Sega Channel was a games-on-demand service that gave cable subscribers access to a library of around 50 Sega Genesis games per month in exchange for a monthly fee (typically $10-$15/month depending on the cable provider). It operated between June 1994 (with a nationwide rollout in December 1994) and June 1998. Cable…
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Tweaking Stunt Island's 30-year-old 3D engine
Note: the patch is available at the end of the article ( HERE ). This post is about its making-of.
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A simple way to scale pixel art games
Previously in How to present MS-DOS screenshots , I encouraged readers to take the original pixel aspect ratio into account when showing pictures of old games. There’s also a subtler issue to consider: the blur analog display systems had.
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Map UI – Ghost in the Shell
Map UI (User Interface) for the film “Ghost in the Shell” Copyright Shirow Masamune / Kodansha • Bandai Visual • Manga Entertainment •
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How to print your Guild Wars 2 character
2025 update v2: I made a tool that fixes distortions introduced by Intel GPA, and that tool made few sections of this blog obsolete. As such, they’ve been deleted. Old version is still available here.2025 update. This blog post now also exists as a youtube video. Yes, the video is 1 hour 20, so about twice as long as…
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It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Super Cassette Vision
The Epoch Cassette Vision was a moderate success. But in 1983, that all ended, when Nintendo and Sega released new consoles, which had more advanced hardware...
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Quake 3 Source Code Review: Network Model (2012)
The network model of Quake3 is with no doubt the most elegant part of the engine. At the lower level Quake III still abstract communications with the NetChannel module that first appeared in Quake World . The most important thing to understand is: In a fast paced environment any information that is not received on…
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OK, I can partly explain the LLM chess weirdness now
(“make LLMs play better with one weird trick”)
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AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing
How to fix jaggies the analytical way with some juicy secrets
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How to Build a Chess Engine and Fail
A Chess-AI is something every programmer should build at least once and [Sebastian Lague’s](https://www.youtube.com/@SebastianLague) [competition](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iScy18pVR58) was the perfect opportunity for me to do so. Constrained to 1024 tokens I wanted to implement an evaluation function similar to…
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Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess
Are they good or bad?
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Something weird is happening with LLMs and Chess
are they good or bad?
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Grim Fandango
My one big regret was the PlayStation version [of Broken Sword] . No one thought it would sell, so we kept it like the PC version. In hindsight, I think if we had introduced direct control in this game, it would have been enormous.
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Texture-Less Text Rendering
How to draw text to a Vulkan renderpass without binding a single texture
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How to find exploits in video games
Reverse Engineering: In this guide, I'll walk you through how I create tools to find exploits in video games for bug bounty programs. Specifically, I'll focus on my research into the game Sword of Convallaria. This exploration is purely for educational purposes. As such, I have removed some of the assets as an…
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Using Ghidra and Python to reverse engineer Ecco the Dolphin
Re-routing the encryption
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Implementing a Tiny CPU Rasterizer
This is a tutorial series on implementing a basic CPU rasterization engine in C++ from scratch. No GPU involved, just drawing pixels with our bare hands, emulating what the GPU usually does for us.
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A Hamiltonian Circuit for Rubik's Cube
At last, the Hamiltonian circuit problem for Rubik's Cube has a solution! To be a little more mathematically precise, a Hamiltonian circuit of the quarter-turn metric Cayley graph for the Rubik's Cube group has been found.
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