This showcases a demo of megatextures running on n64 hardware. A “megatexture” for the n64 is really just a normal sized textured by modern standards but with that you can do some prebaked scenes that look like they don’t belong on the n64.

https://github.com/lambertjamesd/n64brew2023

We analyzed this scene using Nvidia’s Nsight Graphics and AMD’s Radeon GPU Profiler to get some insight into why Starfield performs the way it does. On the Nvidia side, we covered the last three generations of cards by testing the RTX 4090, RTX 3090, and Titan RTX. On AMD, we tested the RX 7900 XTX. The i9-13900K was used to collect data for all of these GPUs.

source: HN

I have been reading Doom Guy by John Romero. It is an excellent book which I highly recommend. In the ninth chapter, John describes being hit by lightning upon seeing Adaptive Tile Refresh (ATS). That made me realize I never took the time to understand how this crucial piece of tech powers the Commander Keen (CK) series.

At its heart the problem ATS solves is bandwidth. Writing 320x200 nibbles (32 KiB) per frame is too much for the ISA bus. There is no way to maintain a 60Hz framerate while refreshing the whole screen. If we were to run the following code, which simply fills all banks, it would run at 5 frames per seconds.

source: HN

Enter Playdate. I had wanted to build a shmup for years, but for various reasons—primarily bad scoping—the efforts always sputtered out. This little yellow device could provide the constraints needed, with the added bonus of a programming challenge to hit consistently high framerates.

source: L

Well that blew up, huh? If you follow emulation or just gaming on the whole, you’ve probably heard about the controversy around the Dolphin Steam release and the Wii Common Key. There’s been a lot of conclusions made, and while we’ve wanted to defend ourselves, we thought it would be prudent to contact lawyers first to make sure that our understanding of the situation was legally sound. That took some time, which was frustrating to ourselves and to our users, but now we are educated and ready to give an informed response.

source: L

Two boxers. No flicker? How is this possible? The MMC2 Mapper chip: Explained

How to draw too many sprites by making one a background, then how to smoothly animate it by side scrolling.

The futex_waitv syscall is a new syscall through which the process can wait for multiple futexes. The task wakes up when any futex in the list is awakened. This can be used to implement wait on multiple locks and wait lists, etc, without the limitations imposed by using eventfd.

source: L

The Wasteland Theatre Company is not your average band of thespians. Dotted all across the world, they meet behind their keyboards to perform inside Fallout 76, a video game set in a post-nuclear apocalyptic America.

There are no ticketed seats, and the company makes no money. The majority of audiences stumble across the performances accidentally in the wasteland, and sit to watch the show for free – or tune in on Twitch, where the company broadcasts every performance live. Characters stride across stages that are cantilevered together from in-game objects. Lighting cues provide atmosphere. Soliloquies are passionately delivered.

source: HN

I spent the last two months (roughly ~150 hours) porting Zelda Classic to run in a web browser.

I hope my efforts result in Zelda Classic reaching a larger audience. It’s been challenging work, far outside my comfort zone of web development, and I’ve learned a lot about WebAssembly, CMake and multithreading. Along the way, I discovered bugs across multiple projects and did due diligence in fixing (or just reporting) them when I could, and even proposed a change to the HTML spec.

Weird how there’s bugs everywhere one looks.

Recap of a lot of work, optimizing and rewriting code to squeeze out performance on limited hardware.

source: HN

Recently, I took a look at Nintendo’s MMC line of mappers, and some other boards. All boards for the NES’ western releases had to be manufactured by Nintendo, and so they generally met certain standards set by Nintendo. But these rules were enforced by technology, not by law. And the company that had previously killed the American game industry decided to break those rules. Madness? No. This… is Tengen.

Lots of custom cartridges here.

Some additional info: https://hackmii.com/2010/01/the-weird-and-wonderful-cic/

source: HN

Intro to porting games between platforms, then also a deep walkthrough of a custom allocator libary.

In this 2019 GDC session, Subset Games co-founder Matthew Davis details the Into the Breach design process from early drafts to the final balancing decisions. Davis dives into years of cut content and iteration to show how Subset Games approached the difficult design challenges of making Into the Breach.

One hour.

Can you beat 1024 of javascript at chess?

source: HN

Some debug-stepping later it turns out it’s… JSON!

Of course it is. But a really solid reversing effort. And a nice fix.

source: HN

This post will cover challenges and aspects of production to consider when creating new rendering / graphics techniques and algorithms – especially in the context of applied research for real time rendering. I will base this on my personal experiences, working on Witcher 2, Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, Far Cry 4, and God of War.

Many of those challenges are easily ignored – they are real problems in production, but not necessarily there only if you only read about those techniques, or if you work on pure research, writing papers, or create tech demos.

I have seen statements like “why is this brilliant research technique X not used in production?” both from gamers, but also from my colleagues with academic background. And there are always some good reasons!

This is quite extensive.

So the issue is such: If you have a joystick plugged in, and the GeForce Experience overlay enabled, your display will not sleep. If you unplug the joystick, the display sleeps. If you disable the overlay, the display sleeps. You can have one or the other - but not both. People hadn’t just tracked the issue down - people tracked it down 3 years ago!

But now for the deep dive disassembly to find and fix the bug. Solid work.

source: HN

Looking back on the early multimedia adventures of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, with a bit of nostalgia on the side.

Previously: https://tedium.co/2019/08/20/teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-nunchucks-censorship/

Game design is one of those nebulous terms to people outside the game industry that’s about as clear as the “astrophysicist” job title is to me. It’s also my job, so I find myself explaining what game design means to a lot of people from different backgrounds, some of whom don’t know anything about games.

I like to describe my job in terms of “The Door Problem”.

This is a fun read.

source: HN

SimCity wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.

The game was inspired by research on real-world urban planning concepts, and although it was created as a way for players to experiment running a city, the goal was to be fun rather than accurate. “I realized early on, because of chaos theory and a lot of other things,” said designer Will Wright, “that it’s kind of hopeless to approach simulations like that, as predictive endeavors. But we’ve kind of caricatured our systems. SimCity was always meant to be a caricature of the way a city works, not a realistic model of the way a city works.”