nintendo switch

A 1951 Bell System training film showing how telephone calls are routed through a step-by-step (Strowger) switching office.

Game Maker's Toolkit examines Nintendo's design approach of starting from a core play mechanic, making it fun, and building around it. Examples include Mario's jump and Luigi's Mansion's vacuum.

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.

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.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths examines scatter plots that were claimed to show fraudulent vote-switching in Michigan's 2020 election. He recreates the analysis and shows that the pattern arises from comparing percentages across different bases, not from fraud.

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.

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.

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

Technology Connections explains how old-fashioned non-electronic rice cookers work, using a magnet and spring switch tripped by the Curie point. It shows the thermodynamics and magnetism behind a simple appliance.

A PBS Space Time episode explaining how space and time swap roles inside a black hole's event horizon. It is part of the channel's black hole series.

Technology Connections explains that the so-called EV charger in an electric car's charging cable or wall unit is really an EVSE, a smart switch that safely delivers AC power. The actual charger is inside the car. The video covers the safety signaling and mechanisms involved.

A Boeing 737 pilot explains the runaway stabilizer checklist, the procedure for stopping unwanted horizontal stabilizer movement such as an MCAS activation on the 737 MAX. He walks through the steps, the trim cutout switches and the jackscrew mechanism, and shows a simulator run including the manual trim wheel effort.

Veritasium explains X-chromosome inactivation, where different cells in a woman's body switch off different X chromosomes, giving a mosaic pattern. It uses animation from the WEHI institute and connects to calico cat coloring.

Technology Connections takes apart a 1970 Wurlitzer 3400 jukebox to show how electromechanical relays and switches automated its behavior without a computer.

Rob Miles explains on Computerphile why implementing an off switch for a general AI is hard. A capable agent would resist being stopped because shutdown prevents it from achieving its goal.

Tom Scott explains why hold music sounds worse than it used to, tracing it to old telephone exchanges and the audio compression applied by modern switches. It is a short visit to the Milton Keynes Museum.

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.

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.