Posts in Category: Uncategorized

Retro Game Development

I have an interest in understanding the game software and hardware of yesteryears. I came upon Fabien Sanglard’s website who goes into technical details about games and hardware with a lot of wonderful visual diagrams. I deeply appreciate people like him who have both the knowledge, talent and patience to write it up for people like me.

Atari Diagram

Inverse Square Hack

I just wanted to pay homage to one of the most brilliant programming optimizations.  This Inverse Square write up should be required reading to show how much thought can go into a single line of code.  In my life I probably will never write a line of code that is as beautiful in it’s intimate knowledge of math and low level computer expertise.

The Early Days of Branch Prediction

Read this quick article on CPU branch prediction.  I feel like a decent understanding of CPU hardware design, but in reality I only know the low level details  till about 92.  Since older CPUs are simpler, they are easier to understand and were developed but much smaller teams.  Modern CPUs are designed by massive teams and each are specializing in certain areas.  It’s interesting to see how topics like branch prediction evolve to use more transistors to get better results.

The $1 MP3 Player

I saw this referred to on Reddit.  Although it lacks headphones, a memory card, or even a USB cable.  You can apparently buy an MP3 player off Ebay for $1.  Or about $1.50 shipped.  I remember buying an MP3 player for $200.  I’m tempted to buy one just to take it apart or to use as some sort of a small mobile product case.  I find this a bit mind blowing.

Picture of the Mini Mirror Surface Clip

Mini Mirror Surface Clip