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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.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,923 posts.
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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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We ran AI agent swarms in Minecraft and Mindustry
Swarms of Claude and GPT agents in Minecraft and Mindustry.
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Genie 4
Genie 4 introduces real-time interactive world simulation with native audio, advanced physics, natural human motion, and steering powered by Gemini models.
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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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Gaussian Splats part 3: There's always a bigger scene
Continuing our Gaussian splatting development series, Director of Technology Sam Birley breaks down how we bypassed GPU Scene instance caps, implemented PlayCanvas Streamed SOG LODs, and managed GPU memory budgets for production-ready photogrammetry… bringing us to a point where the renderer has fin
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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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RimWorld 1.7 moves from Unity to Ludeon's in-house Waylith engine
Ludeon Studios is an independent game developer. We love deep PC games and story generators.
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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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Bevy 0.20
Thanks to 227 contributors, 817 pull requests, community reviewers, and our generous donors, we're happy to announce the Bevy 0.20 release on crates.i…
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2D Vehicles
Explore my 1996 vehicle physics prototype, recreated for the web as Motion Lab.
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VGHF Digital Archive passes 5000 magazines. Here's what's next
We've passed a big milestone for our digital archive. Let's talk about where our magazine collection is going next...
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