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What happened to the Japanese PC platforms?
(This was originally posted on a social media site; I’ve revised and updated it for my blog.) The other day a friend asked me a pretty interesting...
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Getting the World Record in Hatetris (2022)
HATETRIS is the world's hardest version of Tetris; it's Tetris that hates you. In this post, we chronicle our eleven-month journey to get the world record, and some of our wrong turns along the way.
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Flying planes in Microsoft Flight Simulator with a JavaScript autopilot (2023)
Writing auto-pilots in JavaScript for MSFS
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Exponentially Better Rotations (2022)
If you’ve done any 3D programming, you’ve likely encountered the zoo of techniques and representations used when working with 3D rotations. Some of them are better than others, depending on the situation.
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Mario Maker 2 API
Mario Maker 2 API, created Thursday, February 10, 2022
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Playstation Vita Architecture (Part 1)
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Learning Solver Design: Automating Factorio Balancers
I built a Factorio belt balancer solver. From tiny 2x2 grids to a massive 16x16 monster, every step revealed new solver tricks, numeric hiccups, and devious debugging puzzles.
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What I've learned about flow fields so far
Noise functions and the tiniest bit of trigonometry can take you a long way towards making art.
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Building Lego Machines to Destroy Tall Lego Towers
Brick Technology’s new video features increasingly powerful Lego machines designed to topple ever stronger towers. I love their iterative engineering videos (an
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The state of AI for hand-drawn animation inbetweening
There are many potential ways to use AI 1 (and computers in general) for 2D animation. I’m currently interested in a seemingly conservative goal: to improve the productivity of a traditional hand-drawn full animation workflow by AI assuming responsibilities similar to those of a human assistant.
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A game magazine that spent two years taunting a Final Fantasy VIII hater
I’m unsure how popular GameNOW magazine was, but over the course of two years, they pulled off one of the weirdest running gags I’ve seen in a game magazine, just to have fun at the expense of an irate reader who didn’t like Final Fantasy VIII .
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Sphere Rendering: Flat Planets
I'm a Technical Artist with over a decade of professional experience in both AAA and independent projects.
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Reverse engineering the Sega Channel game image file format
Sega Channel was a games-on-demand service that gave cable subscribers access to a library of around 50 Sega Genesis games per month in exchange for a monthly fee (typically $10-$15/month depending on the cable provider). It operated between June 1994 (with a nationwide rollout in December 1994) and June 1998. Cable…
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Crafting Painterly Shaders
A detailed essay on my research and process of building a shader to mimic paint, watercolor, and aquarelle by exploring various implementations of the Kuwahara image smoothing filter.
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The Early Days of Valve from a Woman Inside
The Untold Story Behind a Meteoric Rise
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Let's talk about animation quality
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
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Atari's Mike Jang
Some sad news to report on the blog this week. I got word that long-time Industrial Designer at Atari coin-operated division, Mike Jang, has passed away. I’ve known Mike since 2016, and whils…
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Real-time audio programming 101: time waits for nothing (2011)
“The audio processing thread is stalling because the client’s implementation of some XAudio2 callback is doing things that can block the thread, such as accessing the disk, synchronizing with other threads, or calling other functions that may block. Such tasks should be performed by a lower-priority background thread…
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Atkinson Dithering (2021)
When the Macintosh was released in 1984, it featured a square-pixeled black-and-white display at a crisp 72 dots per inch. The 512x342 resolution might seem less than impressive today, but for the time it was a pleasantly high-resolution consumer-grade computer. Among other things, the monospaced Monaco 9pt bitmap…
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Studios: Please don't spoil the movie we are seated to see
I tweeted this incredibly non-controversial take and it got a huge reaction, so I thought I'd recycle the content for a blog post. Enjoy. We...
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A most profound video game: a good cognitive aid for research
Baba Is You is a philosophical video game that facilitates the kind of thinking needed for frontier topics in the sciences of life and mind.
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Collision Detection (2015)
An online book about collision detection using Processing.
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ZX Spectrum Raytracer
I love raytracers; in fact I’ve written half a book about them. Probably less known is my love for the ZX Spectrum , the 1982 home computer I grew up with, and which started my interest in graphics and programming. This machine is so ridiculously underpowered for today’s standards (and even for 1980s standards), the…
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DOS game “F-15 Strike Eagle II” reverse engineering/reconstruction war stories
Misadventures in 16bit reverse engineering, programming WTFs and general rants about the IT industry.
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Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side
tl;dr: No, not Windows¹, but I’ve decided to expand Infinite Mac to the the black hardware that Mac users secretly lusted after in the 80s and 90s: NeXT. There is now a runnable collection of all notable NeXTStep versions , going from the initial 0.8 preview in 1988 to the final OPENSTEP 4.2 release in 1997.
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Chaos in the medium: Watercolour plotting
Over the past few weeks, I've been experimenting with painting in watercolours using my AxiDraw plotter. Watercolour is a medium I enjoy painting in (by hand) as a personal hobby, kind of separate from my public art making, so it’s been interesting to combine it with code. I’ve thought about trying
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The Curse of Monkey Island
Fair Warning: this article contains plot spoilers for Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge and The Curse of Monkey Island . No puzzle spoilers, however…