Nicole Express

I have a long list, so I'll choose a few personal favorites that may be of interest to HN readers:

https://nicole.express/feed.xml (tinkering with old games and game hardware)

https://shumplations.com/feed (translations of Japanese game developer interviews)

https://www.loc.gov/collections/global-legal-monitor/?fo=rss (summaries of legal news from around the world)

https://reason.com/people/josh-blackman/feed (legal analysis and commentary from Josh Blackman)

https://yukinu.com/feed/atom.xml (charming small web site with links to interesting sites, tech experiments, and looks at old tech)

https://feed.tedium.co (well-researched essays on a variety of topics)

https://blog.sakugabooru.com/feed (detailed essays on the anime industry and production)

htpps://perishablepress.com/feed/atom (personal website of WordPress developer Jeff Starr)

https://ai.mee.nu/feed/atom (daily tech news with strong opinions)

https://www.washingtontimes.com/rss/authors/stephen-dinan (one of the best reporters on immigration law/border issues)

https://liliputing.com/feed (news about mini PCs and mobile devices)

https://worldofmatthew.com/index.xml (essays on digital ownership and random musings)

I would also humbly recommend my own writing project, link in my profile if you're interested

I also recommend looking at Morss.it (https://morss.it/) if there is a site you want to subscribe to without a feed. It generally works very well (RSS Bridge and RSS Hub serve the same purpose if you…

glad to share. it's such a fun topic!

I just thought of this conversation when I saw this video this morning!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei1RJ19IriU

it runs through a variety of Sega Model 2 arcade system games. theoretically there were about a dozen "Model 2" games.

buuuuut, as the video details, the "Model 2" moniker refers to an entire generation of Sega arcade boards and there were significant hardware upgrades and new chips added throughout the lifetime of Model 2. with the result actually being something close to bespoke per-game hardware.

also there's this hilarious (to me at least, from an engineering perspective) look at the extremely unique Popeye arcade hardware, with three different graphics chips each drawing different layers on the screen. that was some bespoke-ass hardware

https://nicole.express/2023/yes-popeye-the-sailor-man.html

I reckon these official converters were instrumental in Tengen's work for reverse engineering the NES to run "unlicensed" games.

It turns out that another blog post on this site explains exactly that:

https://nicole.express/2022/the-center-point-can-not-hold.html

"How did they do it? As it turns out, crime. Unable to reverse engineer the chip, Tengen convinced the United States Copyright Office to hand over the source code of the lockout chip, claiming it was necessary for a lawsuit. With the code in hand, Tengen could make their own clone with ease. And Tengen was going to sue Nintendo for antitrust violations, so they probably figured they could get away with it."

This has got to be the most Cobra Kai thing a company has ever done to another company for the benefit of consumers, and I love every bit of it.

6502 assembly was fairly easy to learn, but it didn't translate to being a productive assembly programmer on the Apple //e I had. In particular, I wanted to do fast 2D and 3D graphics (basically what Ultima III did) to write my own games. My goal was simply to implement SetPixel(x, y, c) which turns out to be tricky because the Apple screen was 280 x 192 so you had to deal with 16-bit math. See https://nicole.express/2024/phasing-in-and-out-of-existence.html for the weird nature of the Apple HIRES graphics mode, and https://github.com/fadden/fdraw/blob/master/docs/manual.md#nutshell for a project that implements fast drawing on the Apple today.

It's kind of amazing how many hard computer problems from the olden days were solved by having more memory. When I got started in computer graphics, there was a lot of research work on how to render images a scanline at a time, since that's all the memory you had. Once you could get enough memory to hold the entire image, you could use a Z-buffer and rendering became kind of trivial.

Another example is the post on HN yesterday about old videogames and how they used a bunch of different hacks such as sprites and tiles because there wasn't enough memory for the whole screen.
https://nicole.express/2023/yes-popeye-the-sailor-man.html

> As I noted in the prior blog post, the Sega Master System has a tilemap that’s only 256 pixels wide, the same as the display area. Therefore, the image is slightly off-center

For anyone else for whom this made no sense, the off-center image is a tradeoff to allow for smooth horizontal scrolling when the tilemap that is used as the source for the display is the same size as the available display area. This is indeed explained in this prior post linked by the author (https://nicole.express/2021/sega-system-1-system-1.html).