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Games & Graphics

The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.

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1831

The MS-DOS Showcase

2,400 MS-DOS games and programs have gone live on the Internet Archive. The full collection is here and the games-specific section (basically all of them, for now) is here. But wait before you clic…

1832

The State of HTML5 Audio

When I started to work on my JavaScript Game Engine back in October 2009, the biggest problems I encountered were with the new HTML5 Audio Element. The Canvas Element already worked nicely in all browsers that supported it at the time, albeit some were a little slow.

1835

IRIX 3dfx Voodoo driver and glide2x IRIX port

At the moment only SST1 (Voodoo1) is supported on IP32 (O2). Only tested on IRIX 6.5.30 with RM7000C CPU. -driver sources (SST1 and CVG support on IP32) https://github.com/sdz-mods/tdfx_irix -glide2x IRIX port (SST1 on IP32) https://github.com/sdz-mods/glide_irix -hinv wrapper with 3dfx support…

1839

Ultima Underworld bugs

As we (Blue Sky Productions, later Looking Glass Technologies / Studios) were developing Ultima Underworld in 1991–1992, largely in a basement room in an office building in Somerville’s Davis Square, we received bug reports both from our own people and the QA team at Origin Systems, who published the game. “Our own…

1841

From NAND to Raytracer: Raytracing on the Hack Computer

I recently spent some time going through the amazing nand2tetris course, and assignment #9 is to implement something with the Jack programming language that runs on the Hack computer. My friend encouraged me to try writing a raytracer, which is an algorithm that generates physically realistic images by simulating…

1844

Steam's Last Stand

In the year 1900, automobile sales in the United States were divided almost evenly among three types of vehicles: automakers sold about 1,000 cars powered by internal combustion engines, but over 1…

1846

Lucasart's Afterlife

I can hardly believe I’m writing a blog post about a game that came out 27 years ago, but here we are. Lucasfilm, at one time had a gaming subsidiary called Lucasarts, and they produced somet…

1847

The failure of Second Life

In July of 2005, when I created my account, Second Life was the cool new thing. Moving between regions was kinda wonky, loading textures and objects was slow, and it was pretty ugly when compared to other games of the time; but it was generally assumed that these were teething issues, which would be quickly sorted out…

1850

An FPGA sprite graphics accelerator

A very warm welcome to my most ambitious project to date. In this project I’m going to attempt to design and build a sprite-based graphics accelerator that will function as a co-processor to an MCU. Using cheap off-the-shelf components I’m hoping to achieve a level of gaming performance that compares well to popular…

1855

Behind the pretty frames: Resident evil

Resident Evil…what a franchise…regardless if you’re old gamer or a new gamer, you can’t have a gaming life without trying at least a single RE game. Horror games have not been my favorite recently, but back in the day Resident Evil, Silent Hill & Alone in The Dark, been on the top of my list. Can’t tell you how many…

1858

Random Thoughts about Unity

From the outside, Unity lately seems to have a problem or two. By “lately”, I mean during the last decade, and by “a problem or two”, I mean probably over nine thousand problems. Fun! But what are they, how serious they are, and what can be done about it?