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Games & Graphics

The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 119 posts.

2015
62

The Loading Screen Game Patent Finally Expires

In 1998, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued Patent 5,718,632, on a method for avoiding “unnecessary wastage of time” in video games. What’s transpired in the 17 years since then can best be described as an unnecessary wastage of time. Namco’s patent covers “auxiliary games” that a player...

65

Reverse Engineering Wipeout

In 1995 one of my all time favorite video games was released: the original WipEout for PlayStation. The brand new PlayStation produced 3D graphics previously unseen on living room TVs and WipEout exploited its capabilities like no other game at the time. It was one of the pioneering titles of the fifth generation…

68

Writing a Game Boy Advance Game

I spent a lot of time as a kid playing (generally, pretty terrible) games on my Game Boy. Having never written code for anything other than 'regular' general purpose computers before, I've been wondering recently: how easy is it to write a Game Boy (Advance) game?

82

Porting a NES Emulator from Go to Nim

Let me get this straight. We have an emulator for 1985 hardware that was written in a pretty new language (Go), ported to a language that isn’t even 1.0 (Nim), compiled to C, then compiled to JavaScript? And the damn thing actually works? That’s kind of amazing.

87

Inside Look at Valve's New Lighthouse Tracking System

While walking around the Bay Area Maker Faire this weekend, I stumbled across an amazing piece of technology: Valve's "Lighthouse" tracking system. Valve's demos were (supposedly) a major contributor to Oculus' fundraising efforts and ultimate sale to Facebook, and this device may have been a key piece of those demos…

88

Microsoft acquires Havok

Today, we are proud to announce that Microsoft has acquired Havok, the leading provider of 3D physics, from Intel. As we welcome Havok to the Microsoft family, we will continue to work with developers to create great gaming experiences, and continue to license Havok’s development tools to partners. We believe that…

89

Five Years of Being a Full-Time Indie Game Developer

Wow, it’s been a while. Figured passing another milestone is worth at least some sort of update. Looking back at my 1 year milestone has been amusing. My initial thought was that almost all the points brought up 4 years ago would no longer apply. A lot of the insights back then are strangely still quite applicable. So…