A few months back, there was a post on Reddit (link), which described a game that used an open source clone of Notepad to handle all its input and rendering. While reading about it, I had the thought that it would be really cool to see something similar that worked with stock Windows Notepad. Then I spent way too much of my free time doing exactly that.

I ended up making a Snake game and a small ray tracer that use stock Notepad for all input and rendering tasks, and got to learn about DLL Injection, API Hooking and Memory Scanning along the way. It seemed like writing up the stuff I learned might make for an interesting read, and give me a chance to show off the dumb stuff I built at the same time, so that’s what these next couple blog posts will be about.

source: HN