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Coding Tricks Used in the C64 Game Seawolves (2025)
An in-depth overview of some of the unusual and very advanced technical tricks used in the Commodore 64 game, Seawolves.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
2612
Yamaha DX7 reverse-engineering, part III: Inside the log-sine ROM
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer for 1980s pop music. It used two custom digital chips to generate so...
2613
Hate Radio (2011)
Anti-Tutsi articles and graphic cartoons began appearing in the Kangura newspaper from around 1990. In June 1993 a new radio station called Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLMC) began broadcasting in Rwanda…
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30cm worm fossil more than half a billion years old discovered in Greenland
Fossils of a new group of animal predators have been located in the Early Cambrian Sirius Passet fossil locality in North Greenland. These large worms may be some of the earliest carnivorous animals to have colonised the water column more than 518 million years ago, revealing a past dynasty of predators that…
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The Death of the Festival
<p>(Part 1 of a multi-part series)</p> <p><em>We live a double life, civilized in scientific and technical matters,</em> <em>wild and primitive in the things of the soul. That we are no longer conscious of being primitive, makes our tamed kind of wildness all the more dangerous.</em> – Hans Von Hentig</p> <p>The…
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Emoji History: The Missing Years
During my research into vintage Japanese drawing software, I came across some devices that had built in sketch or handwritten memo functions. I bought a coup...
2620
Lemmings 2: The Tribes
When the lads at DMA Design started making the original Lemmings , they envisioned that it would allow you to bestow about twenty different “skills” upon your charges. But as they continued working on the game, they threw more and more of the skills out, both to make the programming task simpler and to make the final…
2621
The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves
Naval Officer? Voltaire? William Pitt Lennox? Herb Caen? Howard Jacobs? Norman R. Augustine? Anonymous?
2622
The Road to Ultima V
It’s not easy having a software superstar for a little brother. That’s something that Robert Garriott, president of Origin Systems , had more and more cause to realize as the 1980s wore on. Whilst Richard Garriott quite literally lived out his fantasies, it was Robert who was left to deal with all the mundanities of…
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Primer on FedEx's Distribution Network (2024)
With a map!
2626
Dolosse – a South African invention used over the world
All along the South African coast you find dolosse wherever coastal management is necessary to prevent tides and rough seas from eroding breakwaters, harbour walls, coastal construction. In Port El…
2627
Eighteenth Century English mail hacks (2001)
(((It's very clear that the postal system is not a dead medium. However, the physical and economic structure of the posts has undergone profound, elaborate changes over the centuries. Early postal systems often doubled as espionage networks, and were often proverbially corrupt.
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Von Neumann’s critique of automata theory and logic in computer science (1947)
These remarks from “THE GENERAL AND LOGICAL THEORY OF AUTOMATA” 1947 are enormously insightful – no surprise. Von Neumann essentially predicts the emergence of the field of analysis of algorithms and algorithmic complexity. Not only does he point out the importance of understanding how many steps it will take to carry…
2630
A Swiss Dress from the 16th Century (2015)
(Urs Graf 1517 Since the whole dress on my woodcut isn’t really visible and doesn’t provide any specific details, I collected woodcuts made by Urs Graf, and sorted them into chronologic…
2631
The Shape of Rome (2013)
The new Mayor of the city of Rome, Ignazio Marino, just announced his intention to destroy one of the city’s central roads, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, and turn the area around the old Roman Forum into the world’s largest archaeological park. Reactions have ranged from commuters’ groans to declarations from…
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Standard Ebooks Public Domain Day 2025 in Literature
Read about the new ebooks Standard Ebooks is releasing for Public Domain Day 2025!
2633
Modern TLS/SSL on 16-bit Windows
Lately, there's been an resurgence of new programs written for retro computers—everything from a Slack client to many Wordle clones, to a Mastodon client. But most of these programs, if they connect to the Internet, require a proxy running on a modern computer to handle the SSL/TLS connection, which almost all APIs…
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Intel 80386, part 1: Introduction
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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Tomoya Ikeda – Macintosh Artist
Tomoya Ikeda (池田友也) might not be a name you’re familiar with, but if you used a classic Macintosh computer at any time during in the 1990s you’re likely already familiar with some of his work.
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The rise of the U.S., the rise of China
I spend a lot of time reading about manufacturing and its evolution, which means I end up repeatedly reading about the times and places where radical changes in manufacturing were taking place: Britain in the late 18th century, the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Japan in the second half of the 20th…
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Why did the golden age of the Simpsons end?
Around this time last year, I wrote a post dissecting the decline of The Simpsons from its peak in the mid 90s finding that the golden age of the show spanned an incredible 214 episodes. As a comparison, Friends, which seemed to have been on TV forever, managed 236 episodes...
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John Michell: Country Parson Described Black Holes in 1783 (2000)
When a country parson first described black holes in 1783, the concept was so ahead of its time it was mostly ignored.
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The Seal Failure in the SRB That Doomed Challenger (2021)
Update 7-15-2024 : This article suddenly saw a brief spike of enormous readership in July of 2024! It became the all-time most-viewed-ever...