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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,047 posts.
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Impossible Escape?
Can you use math to escape from, what seems like, an impossible prison escape problem based on coins and a chessboard?
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Metal Slug 2 – reducing the slowdown (2015)
UPDATE 15/05 - DO NOT BUY FROM PEOPLE PRODUCING MODIFIED CARTS, the readme file specifically bans making money from this patch. Since this work is given away entirely for free, a modified cart is worth the same as an unmodified one. If you buy from someone making carts to sell, then you're support
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Hands-On Graphics Without X11
A crash course on direct framebuffer and keyboard access via NetBSD’s wscons
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Far Cry: How the Fire Burns and Spreads (2012)
INTRO A few years ago, I got the opportunity to architect and code the fire propagation system in Far Cry 2. At that time, it was a gigantic task and it scared the hell out of me. Luckily, it turned out well enough. With the upcoming Far Cry 3, several people recently asked me how
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Extracting Super Mario Bros levels with Python
For an upcoming project, I need to extract level data from the classic 1985 video game Super Mario Bros (SMB) . More precisely, I want to extract the background imagery for each stage of the game, excluding HUD elements and moving sprites, etc.
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Lánczos Interpolation Explained (2022)
When you resize, rotate, or in any way transform an image; or more generally when you resample some discrete signal, the software you are using must _interpolate_ between the discrete points to produce a result. Linear and cubic interpolation are easy to explain, but Lánczos interpolation, one of the most popular…
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A first look at Ghidra’s Debugger – Game Boy Advance Edition
Building Ghidra and reviewing the debugging features
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The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality
The driver landscape is something that any practicing GL dev must face unless you like having only a fraction of potential customers able t...
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Choose Your Own Adventure
The first and most iconic of all the Choose Your Own Adventure books involved spelunking, just as did the first and most iconic of all computer-based adventure games .
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Dungeons and Directories, an exploration game in your file explorer
Dungeons and Directories is a short text adventure game that you play in your file browser.
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HybridNeRF: Efficient Neural Rendering
Neural radiance fields provide state-of-the-art view synthesis quality but tend to be slow to render. One reason is that they make use of volume rendering, thus requiring many samples (and model queries) per ray at render time. Although this representation is flexible and easy to optimize, most real-world objects can…
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Flow Field Pathfinding
You may know me for my interactive tutorials. But before that, I was writing visual but non-interactive tutorials. In particular, there wasn’t a lot of information about A* on the web, so I decided to collect all my notes about pathfinding [1] together in one place in the 1990s. But then in the 2010s I started making…
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Roguelike Tutorial: Up-to-Date and Literate
Started on 9th May, 2019 it took almost five months to finish. It again puts the tutorial in a place I am happy with for now, and it will likely stay there for quite some time. Given the priorities and circumstances in my life, I don’t expect to keep working on it for time to come.
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IOCCC Flight Simulator (2010)
The IOCCC Flight Simulator was the winning entry in the 1998 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. It is a flight simulator in under 2 kilobytes of code, complete with relatively accurate 6-degree-of-freedom dynamics, loadable wireframe scenery, and a small instrument panel.
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Reverse Engineering a Keyboard to Play Snake
While I'm a hacker of all kinds of electronics things by night, my day job is being a software developer. That mostly means sitting in front of a computer all day, entering code, debugging, etcetera. You probably can imagine my main weapon of choice to tame all that code is my keyboard: I'm usually happily tapping…
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How does a game engine work? an overview (2016)
Want to develop your own game engine? Here is a nice overview of what you need to implement in order to develop a game engine.
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Why can’t you design noise in frequency space?
The python code that goes along with this blog post can be found at To evaluate the quality of a blue noise texture, you can analyze it in frequency space by taking a discrete Fourier transform. Wh…
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Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production
Note: I’ve seen some online chatter about the possibility that the footage shared in this post could be AI generated (which is pretty depressing, but here we are I suppose). I just wanted to …
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Game Design Perspective: Stardew Valley (2020)
Recently, Juliana has gotten into Stardew Valley. Hard. Since I’m a huge fan myself, I'm doing a Game Design Perspective on the game to celebrate. I'll be looking at the game mechanics and how the interlocking layers make the game tick. In Stardew Valley, you play as a disillusioned city slicker wh
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Quality-of-Life in Tetris Games
Last weekend, we participated in the Ludum Dare game jam for the 10th time. It's a worldwide event
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Algorithmic Mathematical Art (2004)
In the early 1990s, they were merely visualization aids in the study of mathematics. Gradually, the complexity and artistry of the images becomes an end itself.
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How long is that Bézier?
Blog of Raph Levien.
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The Problem With Photorealism
Many people assume that modern graphics technology is now capable of rendering photorealistic video games. If you define photorealistic as ...
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Goldeneye 64's inspirational startup story
GoldenEye 64 had a special place in my heart when I was growing up. It was the first game my parents wouldn’t let me buy due to violent content. I saved up allowances and dug up couch treasures for months to taste the forbidden fruit. The effort turned into one of the pillars of my childhood experiences. I still…
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Deleting multiplayer from the Unreal engine can save memory
Although the title of this article might suggest otherwise, I don’t dislike Unreal’s multiplayer features. As someone who has worked on two different multiplayer games in Unreal, I enjo…
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Apple Copland D11E4 Booting in the Browser
Apple’s ill-fated Copland operating system is notoriously hard to run on real hardware, and has not previously been available in emulation. Here is the last build, D11E4 from June 1996, in an improved DingusPPC.
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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 …