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Topics /
Games & Graphics
The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
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Here be four bits of dragons: the Mattel D&D Computer Game and the TMS1100
When my parents sold the house and moved to the great white north, they dropped off a few boxes of my stuff that was still in the garage. ...
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An array of eight SN76489 sound chips playable via USB MIDI
The SN76489 is the same sound chip as found in the SEGA Master System. This is an array of eight SN76489 sound chips playable via USB...
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The 68000 Wars, Part 2: Jack Is Back
Jack Tramiel, the computer executive most likely to be compared to Darth Vader. I wonder why?
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RoboCop – Breaking the Law. H0ffman Cracks RoboCop Arcade from DataEast
It’s time to take down the future of law enforcement. Following on from my discovery that RoboCop arcade has bootleg protection, see here , I decided it would be fun to crack it. TL;DR –…
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The Collective Ambition Behind Odysseus, a Game-Changing Sci-Fi Larp
A conversation with lead producer Laura Kröger on the making of Odysseus and what it would take to become a permanent institution.
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The Archetypal Resonance of Classic JRPGs
When I learned about Xenogears, I knew that I had to play it. It was an irresistible package, seemingly tuned to my idiosyncrasies: a Japanese RPG from the 1990s golden era, featuring a famously deep (and convoluted) plot, and with a fanbase that still discusses its underrated status with almost re
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My new obsession: A horse-racing board game of pure luck
Someone recently introduced me a weird and wonderful little board game that has become my latest obsession. It's a game for 2-12 players where horses race...
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A Dive into Ray Tracing Performance on the Apple M1
The Apple M1 available in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13", and Mac Mini has been the focus of a ton of benchmarking writeups and blog posts about the new chip. The performance overall, and especially performance/watt, that Apple has achieved with the chip is very impressive. As a ray tracing person, what caught my…
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Real-Time Touch Controller for the Yamaha DX7 Synthesizer
George Barlow initially set out to develop a controller to be able to call up a voice preset, and then tweak from there. What he's done is essentially transformed the DX7 synth into an interactive sound designer's dream machine.
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Codemasters are on the scrounge
This was a joke at the time... we should have seen it coming. I'm beginning to see Codemasters in a very different and negative light ...
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Ken and Roberta (2011)
There are two prototypical kinds of “computer professionals” in the world. First there are the purist hackers, who dive into the depths of circuits, operating systems, and programming languages like explorers discovering new lands; it wasn’t by chance that away from the computer Will Crowther was a caver, nor that he…
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Solving puzzles faster than humanly possible
Can anyone solve 1000 Opus Magnum puzzles in 24 hours? What about with assistance from bots? Will the solutions be any good? Let's find out!
1905
A Hamiltonian Circuit for Rubik's Cube
At last, the Hamiltonian circuit problem for Rubik's Cube has a solution! To be a little more mathematically precise, a Hamiltonian circuit of the quarter-turn metric Cayley graph for the Rubik's Cube group has been found.
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Deconstructing Bézier Curves
Graphists, animators, game programmers, font designers, and other graphics professionals and enthusiasts are often working with Bézier curves. They're popular, extensively documented, and used pretty much everywhere. That being said, I find them being explained almost exclusively in 2 or 3 dimensions, which can be a…
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Gaussian explosion
Over the past month it seems like Gaussian Splatting (see my first post ) is experiencing a Cambrian Gaussian explosion of new research. The seminal paper came out in July 2023, and starting about mid-November, it feels like every day there’s a new paper or two coming out, related to Gaussian Splatting in some way…
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Derivatives and Logarithms of 3D Transforms
Understanding derivatives and logarithms of transforms
1909
Train Simulator Controller
From January to July 2026, I have continued to work on my UK Class 800-inspired train simulator. There are a number of components in progress, but few newly completed: in lieu of posts about completed portions of the simulator, here’s a roundup of progress across the different hardware aspects of the project.
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Exploring Neural Graphics Primitives
Neural fields have quickly become an interesting and useful application of machine learning to computer graphics. The fundamental idea is quite straightforward: we can use neural models to represent all sorts of digital signals, including images, light fields, signed distance functions, and volumes.
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GSoC'24: Differentiable Logic for Interactive Systems and Generative Music
Last summer , I participated in Google Summer of Code for the first time, working with GRAME on improving support for using the Faust audio programming language on the web .
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Smooth Video Game Emulation in Emacs
I have a lengthy TODO.org of things I might eventually implement for Emacs, most of which are not exactly useful, are challenging to do or fulfill both conditions. A NES emulator fits all of these criteria neatly. I’ve kept hearing that they can run on poor hardware and learned that the graphics fit into a tiled model…
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Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin
Back in 2020, Hal Hickel answered a Quora question with great detail about how we created Grand Moff Tarkin for "Rogue One" (2016), and in t...
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Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite
Benchmarking World of Warcraft performance when running native and emulated on Windows on ARM.
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Raiders of the Lost Ark as a Black-and-White Silent Film (2014)
(Note: This posting is for educational purposes only.)I’m assuming the phrase “staging” came out of the theatre world, but it’s equally at home (and useful) in the movie world, since the term (roughly defined) refers to how all the various elements of a given scene or piece are aligned, arranged, and coordinated. In mo
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Rollercoaster Tycoon (Or, MicroProse's Last Hurrah)
I think it touches on two of the most fundamental aspects of human nature. We all like doing something constructive, where we can see that we are creating something from virtually nothing, and we all have a desire to nurture or look after things. This is what the game is all about. You spend hours painstakingly…
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UDP for games – encryption and DDoS protection
Quote: Yes, you DO need to encrypt your UDP traffic. And no, using UDP is NOT a valid excuse to skip encryption Another Quote: Personally, I prefer to think ...
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Evolving an image out of polygons
Shareware games, New Zealand Game Developers Screaming Duck Software are the makers of the puzzle games Fitznik, Fitznik 2 and Drippy
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Two and a Half Years in GameDev
About 3 years ago, I joined a GameDev company, without any prior experience making games or hands-on exposure to this industry. Statistically, this time is not even enough to release a single game. But during that window, I was lucky to meet many talented people deeply involved in modern GameDev, who shared with me…