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4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys
So I have been working on Miegakure for a long time now, and I have created and accumulated many cool 4D things of all sorts. I think it’s about time that I share some of them, so…
Topics /
Games & Graphics
The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
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Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
Thoughts, tools, and libraries I use to make games
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Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor
Here is a link to full schematics. Thanks to whoever made this. I just found a few issues with it. The CLK input to the 7474 on page 2 should be HRESET, not CLK. Pin 5 of the 555's on pages 5 and 6 should be connected to the capacitor. Also some of the nodes are inconsistently labeled.
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A Great Old-Timey Game-Programming Hack
A long time ago, when I was a college undergrad, I spent some time working on computer video games. This was in the 8-bit PC era, when the gaming hardware was almost impossibly slow by today’s standards.
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Riven
Sometimes success smacks you right in the face. More often, it sneaks up on you from behind.
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Adding a hinge to a Game Boy that God never intended
The Game Boy Pocket SP
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Beware of Transparent Pixels
If you use sprites with transparency in your game — and you most likely do for the UI at least — you’ll probably want to pay …
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Graphics for JVM
Introducing Skija, Java bindings for Google graphics library, Skia
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Learning music with Strudel
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
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Fixing Mass Effect black blobs on modern AMD CPUs
Graphical artifacts caused by a CPU, not GPU? Sure thing.
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What every coder should know about gamma
Personal blog of John Novak
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Statically Recompiling NES Games into Native Executables with LLVM and Go
I have always wanted to write an emulator. I made a half-hearted attempt in college but it never made it to a demo-able state. I also didn't want to write Yet Another Emulator. It should at least bring something new to the table. When I discovered LLVM , I felt like I finally had worthwhile idea for a project.
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Game design is simple
So, let’s just walk through the whole thing, end to end. Here’s a twelve-step program for understanding game design.
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A minimax chess engine in regular expressions
I wrote a (list of) regular expressions that will play a (not very good) chess game by running a 2-ply minimax search.
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Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
It’s been a weird and awesome couple of months. Our expectations for our tiny game were well, fairly tiny. Basically, we hoped it’d do better than Puzzlejuice. It did. By a lot. It’s still hard to address the world’s response with something beyond a wide-eyed daze but essentially we couldn’t be more thrilled. Duh.
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Interactive intro to shaders
Demystify shaders with this beginner-friendly guide. Explore fragment shaders, signed distance functions, and metaballs through interactive code examples. Learn how to create beautiful blob animations and effects using just a few lines of code.
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How to draw an outline in a video game
🖍️ Explaining multiple techniques for rendering outlines and highlights for real-time applications. This includes vertex object-space as well as screen-space methods. This can be used to render outlines in Unity or Unreal. Outlines can be used for gameplay reasons or aesthetics.
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Street Fighter II paper trails – allocating sprite space by hand
The late 90s saw the emergence of Capcom in the world of arcades. The Osaka based company seemed to produce one hit after another with Ghouls'n Ghosts in 1988, Final Fight in 1989 and Street Fighter II in 1991 among a myriad of other excellent games.
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There oughta be a Game Boy capture cartridge
I present to you: The GB Interceptor. It is an adapter that goes between an unmodified Game Boy and the cartridge and offers a video stream of the game via USB. Click the image to see the video on youtube.com. The video above should give you a good overview of what it does, how it works and what its limitations are…
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The Game of Everything, Part 1: Making Civilization
If my gravestone says, “Sid Meier, developed Civilization,” I’m happy with that. It’s a game I’m happy to be known for.
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Pokegb: A gameboy emulator that only plays Pokémon Blue, in 68 lines of C++
POKEGB: A gameboy emulator that only plays Pokémon Blue, in 62 lines of c++. source: https://t.co/AGt7RUTr9H pic.twitter.com/o0BUUmzNOt
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Half-Life
Around twenty years ago, people would have laughed if you told them that videogames would end up at the Smithsonian, but the Half-Life team really did want to make games that were more than just throwaway toys. The rule against cinematics — which made our jobs much harder and also ended up leaving a lot of my favorite…
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2048 Numberwang
Join the numbers and get Numberwang! Careful: this game is extremely addictive!
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Desktop compositing latency is real
Update: Note that the capture method I use needs to read pixels back from the GPU which can be slow. This means the Windows 10 results are probably worse than they should be. However, without external hardware this seems to be the only way to measure keyboard to screen latency.
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Rendering the Sky, Sunsets, and Planets
This article explores how to render realistic skies and atmospheres in real time in the browser with shaders, from simple sky domes, to entire planets using shaders, raymarching, Rayleigh and Mie scattering, and ozone absorption.
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GPU Fluid
Benedikt Bitterli's Portfolio
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