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How a Light Saber Works
[ Metanote: This explanation arose out of a lunch-time discussion with a colleague who claimed a light saber could not exist since the light beam it emits could not just stop in mid-air after 75 cm. I thank this colleague for the challenge. ]
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Gog.com Soon On More Platforms
Download the best classic and new games on Windows, Mac & Linux. A vast selection of titles, DRM-free, with free goodies and 30-day money-back guarantee.
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Recreating the THX Deep Note
We dissect the building blocks of the infamous THX Deep Sound and recreate it by synthesizing the sound in Supercollider programming environment.
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Microsoft buys Minecraft for 2.5B
The latest news and stories about how technology is helping people around the world solve problems, innovate and do more each day.
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OpenXcom 1.0
More platforms coming soon. For those making the ports, don’t forget to include the extra translations with your release. There’s also a Source Tarball available with it all included .
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The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality
The driver landscape is something that any practicing GL dev must face unless you like having only a fraction of potential customers able t...
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Reverse Engineering a Keyboard to Play Snake
While I'm a hacker of all kinds of electronics things by night, my day job is being a software developer. That mostly means sitting in front of a computer all day, entering code, debugging, etcetera. You probably can imagine my main weapon of choice to tame all that code is my keyboard: I'm usually happily tapping…
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The Problem With Photorealism
Many people assume that modern graphics technology is now capable of rendering photorealistic video games. If you define photorealistic as ...
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Asm.js performance improvements in the latest version of Firefox
The latest version of Firefox which launched last week includes a major update to the user interface as well as to features like Sync. Another area in which this release ...
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Classic NES Series Anti-Emulation Measures
Some of you may remember a series of peculiar Game Boy Advance games that came out over the course of 2004. In stark contrast with the usual dark grey cartridges with colorful labels, a set of light grey cartridges with simple labels were released containing games ported from the original Nintendo Entertainment…
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Deep learning for chess
Erik Bernhardsson
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Ultima IV
There’s lots of somethings to be said for sheer audacity in art, for a willingness to stick your neck out and give your audience something they never, ever expected from you. I think sometimes about how the first folks who listened to Revolver must have felt when the erstwhile cuddly Fab Four unleashed the…
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Speed memory access by arranging data to take advantage of CPU caching
We’ve been lied to. They keep showing us charts where CPU speed goes up and up every year as if Moore’s Law isn’t just a historical observation but some kind of divine right. Without lifting a finger, we software folks watch our programs magically accelerate just by virtue of new hardware.
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Intrusive lists in Doom 3
Doom 3 was released in 2004, which I can't believe was a decade ago. Great game, atmospheric and scary, and a worthy successor of the first two games in the series. Several years after the initial release, in 2011, Doom 3's source code was published on Github. It can be fun to poke around the repository to learn how…
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Dissecting the 128-byte raycaster
Lately a Reddit post caught my attention which is about a raycaster demo, animated, with mouse control and texture mapping, in only 128 byt...
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Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600
If you're reading this page, chances are that you're already well aware that E.T. for the Atari 2600 is one of the most reviled games ever made. I never understood why. As a child, it was one of my favorite games. I still think it's a good game. Apparently , I'm not alone .
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Virtual reality affects men and women differently
Last week, I wrote a provocative opinion piece for Quartz called “Is the Oculus Rift sexist?” I’m reposting it on my blog for posterity, but also because I want to address some of the critiques that I received. First, the piece itself:
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Fun with Lisp: Programming the NES (2012)
"Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul." -John Carmack When the complexity of modern computing gets fatiguing, I look back to the simpler machines of my childhood. I grew up surrounded by various 8-bit and 16-bit machines (most of them already a few years outdated at the time),…