doom

A short Kurzgesagt animation explaining the Great Filter, the idea that finding alien life might be bad news because it implies something usually destroys civilizations. It connects the concept to the Fermi paradox.

ElectroBOOM examines whether 5G and other electromagnetic waves can harm people, explaining the EM spectrum and the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. It includes experiments and measurements in his usual humorous style.

Kaze 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.

Technology Connections takes a long, detailed look at how a 1970s electromechanical pinball machine works, from relays to stepper motors and mechanical logic. It is the first part of a series.

Retro Game Mechanics Explained dissects how Atari's Quadrascan vector displays and vector generator hardware drew games like Asteroids and Tempest.

Noodle explores how retro pixel art was designed for CRT displays and why games look different on LCDs, with input from pixel artists and CRT researchers.

A 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.

Linkus7 explains how a community reverse-engineered The Wind Waker to predict its random number generator and beat the Sploosh Kaboom battleship minigame consistently. It includes d3 animations by Peter Schmidt-Nielsen.

The 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.

Moon Channel, run by a lawyer, explains the legal basis for emulation, including the history of emulation case law and Nintendo's takedown of Dolphin's Steam release. It argues the legality of emulators is more fragile than most people assume.

An episode of Coding Secrets by Jon Burton on retro copy protection, in particular physically damaging a disk with a laser so copies fail. It explains how this defeated hackers and pirates.

A 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.

Modern Vintage Gamer looks at OpenLara, an open source Tomb Raider engine, running on the Game Boy Advance. The video explains how the port achieves playable speeds on the GBA's slow ARM CPU, with input from the developer XProger.

Retro Game Mechanics Explained shows how the Atari 2600 draws images with almost no video memory, by having the CPU race the CRT beam line by line. It walks through the techniques in detail.

A speedrunner-made explanation of the Super Mario World credits warp, an arbitrary code execution glitch that jumps the game straight to the ending. It simplifies the underlying assembly and memory behavior with animations so non-experts can follow.

Kaze Emanuar searches for the best sine approximation for the Nintendo 64, comparing the lookup tables in Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time with polynomial alternatives. It walks through numerics and 3rd, 4th and 5th order approximations.

Technology Connections takes apart the step-by-step electromechanical logic of a 1970s pinball machine. He shows how relays, steppers and switches track state and score without electronics.

A Design Club episode that analyzes how Super Mario Bros. level 1-1 teaches players to play through level design alone, without text tutorials.

aGameScout explains rolling, the third major NES Tetris playstyle, in which players tap the back of the controller to move pieces faster than hypertapping. It covers how the technique works and where it comes from.

Modern Vintage Gamer explains why PlayStation 1 graphics warped and jittered, comparing it with the Nintendo 64. The causes are affine texture mapping and the lack of sub-pixel vertex precision.

8-Bit Show And Tell walks through the BASIC source code of the original Commodore 64 Sid Meier's Pirates!. It covers bugs, quirks and traces of abandoned features and scenarios left in the code.

Vox breaks down how great rappers build rhymes, from Kurtis Blow's simple bars to Biggie's smooth flow and Kendrick Lamar's dense, fast delivery. It uses on-screen visualizations of rhyme structure.

Kurzgesagt's animated take on climate change argues that, despite alarming headlines, there are real reasons for hope as technology, policy and public attitudes shift. It surveys trends and solutions while acknowledging the scale of the problem.

Soup Emporium's deep dive argues that Yellowstone is not a ticking timebomb. It goes through uplift and subsidence, earthquakes and what the caldera really is, to rebut supervolcano doom claims.