Cheating the Hardware
Curated by Claude · 12 videos · 6 hr 14 min
HN never gets tired of stories about game developers beating hardware that should not have been able to run their game. This playlist goes in rough order of the hardware: vector monitors, CGA, the Apple II, 8-bit palettes, the Game Boy, the 90s software renderers, the PlayStation and N64. It ends with modern programmers who go back to old consoles by choice.
Play all on YouTube- 17:08
How "oldschool" graphics worked Part 1 - Commodore and Nintendo
5.7M views • 11 years agoThe 8-Bit GuyThe 8-Bit Guy explains the color limitations of 1980s computers and consoles such as the NES and Commodore 64. It shows how sprites, attributes and palettes shaped the look of old games.A seven-minute primer on sprites, attribute grids and palettes that gives you the vocabulary for everything after it.
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Atari's Quadrascan Explained
239K views • 5 years agoRetro Game Mechanics ExplainedRetro Game Mechanics Explained dissects how Atari's Quadrascan vector displays and vector generator hardware drew games like Asteroids and Tempest.Before pixels were cheap, Asteroids and Tempest drew with an electron beam, and HN's pick for how that vector hardware worked is this one.
- 311:27
CGA Graphics - Not as bad as you thought!
2.4M views • 10 years agoThe 8-Bit GuyThe 8-Bit Guy covers IBM's 1981 CGA graphics system, including how composite output and artifacting produced extra colors beyond the nominal palette. He argues CGA looked better in period than it does on RGB monitors.The 1981 IBM PC's four-color mode turns out to give more colors on a composite monitor, and HN praises it for showing how developers took advantage of the smeared signal.
- 420:49
How Prince of Persia Defeated Apple II's Memory Limitations | War Stories | Ars Technica
1.5M views • 6 years agoArs TechnicaIn an Ars Technica War Stories episode, Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner describes how he made the game on the Apple II, fighting hardware memory limits and the platform's decline. It covers the rotoscoped animation and the engineering tricks involved.Jordan Mechner on rotoscoped animation and memory tricks on a dying platform, which HN calls essential viewing for game history.
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1:25:348 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box
568K views • 9 years agoGDC Festival of GamingMark Ferrari, the LucasArts background artist, explains in a GDC 2016 talk how he draws 8-bit graphics. He covers color cycling and palette shifting to create complex animated scenery without frame animation.The highest-scored video in game history on HN: LucasArts artist Mark Ferrari animating whole scenes with nothing but palette cycling.
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1:01:07The Ultimate Game Boy Talk (33c3)
241K views • 9 years agomedia.ccc.deMichael Steil's 33c3 talk explains essentially everything about the Game Boy: CPU, video hardware, peripherals, and the tricks used by games and demos. It revives the era of counting clock cycles around hardware limits.Michael Steil explains nearly the whole handheld in an hour, and HN tells would-be emulator authors to watch it first.
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1:22:13HandmadeCon 2016 - History of Software Texture Mapping in Games
15K views • 9 years agoMolly RocketA HandmadeCon 2016 panel where Chris Hecker, John Miles, Sean Barrett and Chris Green give an oral history of software texture mapping in 90s games.Hecker, Barrett and others tell the oral history of how 90s PCs drew textured 3D with no GPU, a rarely watched first-hand account.
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3:05Why does PUNCHING Sonic 3D trigger a Secret Level Select?
510K views • 6 years agoCoding SecretsA short Coding Secrets episode explaining why hitting a Sonic 3D cartridge triggers a hidden level select. The cause was a custom crash handler that redirected CPU error interrupts to the level select screen.A three-minute anecdote about a crash handler that sends a CPU fault to the level select, a small example of the kind of defensive engineering the next video relies on.
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31:37How Crash Bandicoot Hacked The Original Playstation | War Stories | Ars Technica
5.2M views • 6 years agoArs TechnicaIn Ars Technica's War Stories, Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin explains how the team squeezed Crash Bandicoot onto the original PlayStation. They overwrote Sony library code in RAM, built custom animation compression, and streamed assets around slow seek times.The centerpiece and one of HN's most recommended dev stories: Andy Gavin overwriting Sony's own libraries in RAM to make room for his game.
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20:08Fast Inverse Square Root — A Quake III Algorithm
6M views • 5 years agoNemeanA walkthrough of the Quake III fast inverse square root, explaining where the constant 0x5f3759df comes from. It covers IEEE 754 floats, the bit hack that approximates a logarithm, and a Newton's method refinement.The most famous single trick of the era, 0x5f3759df, explained clearly enough that HN commenters say it finally made sense.
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18:20FIXING the ENTIRE SM64 Source Code (INSANE N64 performance)
3.2M views • 4 years agoKaze EmanuarKaze Emanuar explains how he rewrote and optimized the Super Mario 64 source code so it runs far faster on real N64 hardware. He covers performance bottlenecks and fixes in detail for his ROM hacks.A modern coda: Kaze Emanuar finds bus contention and other N64 bottlenecks and makes Mario 64 render up to six times faster on real hardware.
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12:04How we fit an NES game into 40 Kilobytes
3.7M views • 8 years agoMorphcat GamesMorphcat Games explains how they fit Micro Mages, a full-featured NES game, into 40 kilobytes. It covers compression of sprites and level layouts and other space-saving tricks.It ends in 2018 with a studio that chose the NES's limits on purpose, the video HN links whenever someone asks how old games were so small.