The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 109 posts.
Some of you may remember a series of peculiar Game Boy Advance games that came out over the course of 2004. In stark contrast with the usual dark grey cartridges with colorful labels, a set of light grey cartridges with simple labels were released containing games ported from the original Nintendo Entertainment…
This week, we got the emulation of MS-DOS programs (mostly) working on the Internet Archive. Up to now, every single emulated system has been via the JSMESS project, which supports well over 600 sy…
Special note: an earlier version of this post appeared on a new blog I helped develop in partnership with Not Even Past of the Univer...
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
This is a really strange blog post to have to write, simply because the situation is absurd. It would be comedic, really, if the situation was not costing me money and resulted in one of my best-se…
A recent blog post by consultant John Cook reminded everybody about the infamous “Hello World” programs in the early chapters of the first five editions of Programming Windows:
The story behind Zusie begins in May 2008, when I went on vacation to Berlin for a few days with a friend. As is my habit, I looked for interesting technical or scientific sites to visit, and the main thing to visit was the Technische Museum. I think I spent a full day day there, to the expressed dismay of my friend…
Even today, plenty of disinformation still abounds regarding the WIZ code. A 22.050Khz wobble that was used to identify legitimate CD's. Maybe one day we'll put them to rest... :)
Clever tricks used by medieval astronomers to tabulate sines at every degree, before calculators and before calculus.
WoW has always been a contradiction of sorts: not the pioneer, but the one that solidified the pattern. Not the experimenter, but the one that reaped the rewards. Not the innovator, but the one that was well-designed, built solidly, and made appealing. It was the MMO that took what has always been there, and delivered…
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
I never met Alexander Grothendieck. I was never in the same room with him. I never even saw him from a distance. But whenever I think about math — which is to say, pretty much every day ̵…
There was a recent thread about the Apple 1’s noisy -5 volt supply on Applefritter , so I asked Woz the following:
When work began on JSMESS a couple years ago, I knew that it was probably somewhat easy to do all this conversion work for MAME (the arcade side) as it was for MESS (the computer and console side).…
This articles is a follow-up of this one about standard zoning practices in North America. It is advised to read the previous article to b...
Apple’s forgotten software gem was a last breath for democratized computing. Can it be revived?
Fig. 5.1 Wall in in Hatunrumiyoc street, Cuzco. Polygonal stones usually have pillowed (convex) faces and bevelled, sunken joints.
2012 note: This article was first published in 2005. After it was published, Django launched a RemovingTheMagic project to address some of my criticisms (though personally I still find it unusable), web.py inspired FriendFeed’s tornado.web and Google’s gae.webapp and others (though I still prefer web.py), and this…
Computing pioneer Alan Kay tells us that a computer is "an instrument whose music is ideas." This seems like a beautiful metaphor, until you realize that we have somehow ended up in a world where the profession of musician is nearly unknown. To continue with this analogy, let's imagine that you were a child who loves…
We are used to having multiple books open at the same time when looking things up at home or writing an essay for class. Whether PDFs, e-books or old-fashioned paper volumes, switching between book…
This led to some general discussion that this particular device really is in a class of devices, now called the "killers", which need to be made.
The 8-bit Z80 microprocessor is famed for use in many early personal computers such the Osborne 1, TRS-80, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The Z80...
Mark Twain? Jonathan Swift? Thomas Francklin? Fisher Ames? Thomas Jefferson? John Randolph? Charles Haddon Spurgeon? Winston Churchill? Terry Pratchett? Anonymous?
Transcript of VHF channel 16 on the night of the Estonia disaster.
