retro graphics

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.

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.

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.

The 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.

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

A two-minute explainer of 3D Gaussian Splatting, the rendering technique from a 2023 research paper. It outlines why it could change how 3D graphics are made.

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.

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.

PolyMatter's first part of a series on China's demographic collapse, covering the effects of the one-child policy, shrinking workforce and economic consequences.

Freya Holmer explains how Bezier curves work, from the helper-line construction to their uses in animation, text rendering and shapes. It uses visuals from her Unity Shapes plugin and was a SoME1 contest winner.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains the delayed choice quantum eraser and argues it does not rewrite the past, as popular accounts claim. She walks through what the experiment actually shows.

A video essay explaining hauntology, Mark Fisher's idea of lost futures, and 80s nostalgia. It uses the Fallout games and other media as examples of a retro-futurism that mourns futures that never arrived.

Freya Holmer's 74-minute video essay on splines, covering Bezier curves, B-splines, derivatives and the different levels of continuity (C0, C1, C2), built with custom animation tools. She notes she did not cover non-uniform splines.

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.

FortNine explains how Harley-Davidson ended up in decline, from a narrow lifestyle niche and an aging customer base to the pandemic hitting a company already in trouble.

A Kurzgesagt explainer on why the human population exploded and why growth is slowing, drawing on Our World in Data. It argues that birth rates fall as countries develop, easing overpopulation fears.

Rune Skovbo Johansen explains Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering, a technique he invented and released as open source. It makes dithering stick to 3D surfaces and covers the experiments and shortcomings along the way, inspired by Return of the Obra Dinn.

Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia analyzes Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, the first AAA game built around ray tracing. It covers the new global illumination, emissive lighting, DLSS and performance on AMD and Nvidia hardware.

A Computerphile video in which Dr Mike Pound and PhD student Lewis Stuart explain 3D Gaussian splatting, a quick technique that turns photos of a scene into a 3D model without much compute. It includes a demo and compares the approach to NeRFs.

Walt Disney Animation Studios' short introduction to path tracing, showing how rays are traced and bounced through a virtual scene to simulate light. It explains how this approach is used in animated films.

A Kurzgesagt animation on South Korea's record-low fertility rate and rapidly aging population. It explains why a demographic collapse looks hard to reverse and projects the population shrinking sharply by 2060.

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.

LGR looks at the 1988 Canon Xap Shot, a still video camera that records photos to a floppy disk as analog NTSC signal rather than digital data.

Linus Tech Tips looks at whether buying a used GPU that was previously used for crypto mining is a good idea, as miners prepare to sell off cards. The video discusses how mining affects wear on cards and what to watch for.

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.

A short animation that pairs the sound of a dialup modem handshake with a graphic explaining what each phase of the sound means.

A short cartoon explaining how language models like ChatGPT work, from autocomplete and conditional probabilities to neural networks, gradient descent and backpropagation. It shows how networks act as universal function approximators.

Tom Scott visits the Swiss Military Museum to see the last surviving 1970s tank-driving simulator. It uses a real camera moving over a miniature model landscape rather than any computer graphics.

Linus Tech Tips reviews Walmart's $250 Motile 14-inch Ryzen laptop and finds it surprisingly decent for the price. It covers the Ryzen 3 chip, Vega graphics, and aluminum build.