Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 263 posts.

History & Retro Computing
97

Loom EGA/VGA Comparison

The original EGA background art for Loom was made by Mark Ferrari . The character art was done by Gary Winnick and Steve Purcell . Gary Winnick designed the sprites and did most of the sprite animation, while Steve Purcell did the larger character portraits and some additional animation. Ken Macklin did the effects…

103

System Shock

We approached games as immersive simulations. We wanted to build game environments that reacted to player’s decisions, that behaved in natural ways, and where players had more verbs than simply “shoot.” DOOM was not an influence on System Shock. We were trying something more difficult and nuanced, [although] we still…

120

Analogue Pocket Hate Story

Back in late 2019, the FPGA -based hardware emulation company Analogue , known for their near-flawless clones of various retro video game consoles announced an exciting new product. This time around, instead of plugging into your TV and playing the games of one system (per device), the product called the Analogue…