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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 119 posts.
NES Graphics – Part 2
Part 1 discussed the components of NES background graphics – chr, nametable, palettes, and attributes. But this was only half of the story.
The tech arms race in AAA games and why I'm abandoning it
A blog about video game development
MAME and the New Emulation Reality
I’m sorry all my weblog entries seem to be variations of emulation, Internet Archive, Archive Team and Vintage Computing, but that’s kind of all my life is right now anyway. (I’m …
Turn any part of your screen into a playable level of Super Mario Bros
Screentendo is a desktop application that allows you to turn a selection of your screen into a playable level of Super Mario Bros. I’ve never built a Cocoa app or used Sprite Kit before, so it was …
Voxel Quest Fluid Dynamics and New Rendering Method
Fluid works quite well now. Constant volume, pressure, multithreaded, 2 mil units. #gamedev pic.twitter.com/mYUoF9L9wj
Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Graphics Study
2015/03/12: Back online after Reddit and Slashdot killed my bandwidth with 30,000 visits in the last hours. Followed by HN. 2015/03/11: Update with …
Inside Look at Valve's New Lighthouse Tracking System
While walking around the Bay Area Maker Faire this weekend, I stumbled across an amazing piece of technology: Valve's "Lighthouse" tracking system. Valve's demos were (supposedly) a major contributor to Oculus' fundraising efforts and ultimate sale to Facebook, and this device may have been a key piece of those demos…
Hyperlapse makes first-person videos smooth and speedy
Professional photographer Nick Didlick always wanted to make a great ski movie, but he had long been stymied by the need for two things: Tons of pricey camera gear, and plenty of time to shoot.
A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art
Play the Chrome dinosaur game online, free and without installing anything. Jump the cacti, duck the pterodactyls, add your score to your country and challenge friends in a battle.
First Look at the Rift, Shipping Q1 2016
Since the earliest days of the Oculus Kickstarter, the Rift has been shaped by gamers, backers, developers, and enthusiasts around the world....
Porting a NES Emulator from Go to Nim
Let me get this straight. We have an emulator for 1985 hardware that was written in a pretty new language (Go), ported to a language that isn’t even 1.0 (Nim), compiled to C, then compiled to JavaScript? And the damn thing actually works? That’s kind of amazing.
NES graphics – Part 1
Released in 1983, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) home console was a cheap, yet capable machine that went on to achieve tremendous success. Using a custom designed Picture Processing Unit (PPU) for graphics, the system could produce visuals that were quite impressive at the time, and still hold up fairly well…
Towards Realtime Deformable Worlds: Why Tetrahedra Rule, Voxels Drool
In this article I provide a chronicle of our turbulent terrain development, what lessons I've learned and what's next. Also, why tetrahedra ...
What happens if you remove randomness from Doom?
For some reason, recently I have been thinking about Doom. This evening I was wanting to explore some behaviour in an old version of Doom and to do so, I hex-edited the binary and replaced the random number lookup table with static values.
Pokemon Yellow Total Control Hack
Taking over Pokemon Yellow from the inside.
Chord progressions of 25,000 songs
Systems thinker who ended up in data. Mostly working out why organisations can't answer their own questions.
Reverse Engineering Wipeout
In 1995 one of my all time favorite video games was released: the original WipEout for PlayStation. The brand new PlayStation produced 3D graphics previously unseen on living room TVs and WipEout exploited its capabilities like no other game at the time. It was one of the pioneering titles of the fifth generation…
Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2
NOTE: This article has been superseded by my more recent one here
John Carmack's First Game
A blog in which a dedicated addict plays through all PC computer role-playing games (CRPGs), in chronological order.
1K colours on CGA: How it's done
[Update: VileR’s writeup of the 1K colour mode is now up. His has fewer technical details but is much easier to understand than mine as it has pictures!]
Videogame Publishers: No Preserving Abandoned Games Because “Hacking” Is Illegal
The Entertainment Software Association doesn’t want anyone to restore the functionality of older videogames that are no longer supported by their publisher, because, says ESA, this is “hacking,” and all hacking is “associated with piracy.” EFF, along with law student Kendra Albert, is asking the...
The 68000 Wars, Part 2: Jack Is Back
Jack Tramiel, the computer executive most likely to be compared to Darth Vader. I wonder why?
I made an NES emulator – What I learned about the original Nintendo
Interesting technical tidbits about the NES…