Skip to content
HomeVideos
AllLongsCategoriesPlaylists
BooksBlogsPodcasts
HistoryListsWatch laterLiked videosFollowing

The videos, books, blogs and podcasts Hacker News keeps recommending, all in one place.

VideosBooksBlogsPodcastsAboutPrivacySettings

Data from Hacker News, HackerTube, HackerBooks, HackerBlogs and Open Library. Credits · Not affiliated with Y Combinator.

HomeVideosBooksBlogsPodcasts
Ctrl K
    12 videos · 6 hr 14 min
    Playlists

    Cheating the Hardware

    Curated by HackerTube · 12 videos · 6 hr 14 min

    HN never gets tired of stories about game developers beating hardware that should not have been able to run their game. This playlist goes in rough order of the hardware: vector monitors, CGA, the Apple II, 8-bit palettes, the Game Boy, the 90s software renderers, the PlayStation and N64. It ends with modern programmers who go back to old consoles by choice.

    Play all on YouTube
    1. 1
      7:08

      How "oldschool" graphics worked Part 1 - Commodore and Nintendo

      The 8-Bit Guy · 5.7M views · 11 years ago

      A seven-minute primer on sprites, attribute grids and palettes that gives you the vocabulary for everything after it.

    2. 2
      20:57

      Atari's Quadrascan Explained

      Retro Game Mechanics Explained · 240K views · 5 years ago

      Before pixels were cheap, Asteroids and Tempest drew with an electron beam, and HN's pick for how that vector hardware worked is this one.

    3. 3
      11:27

      CGA Graphics - Not as bad as you thought!

      The 8-Bit Guy · 2.4M views · 10 years ago

      The 1981 IBM PC's four-color mode turns out to give more colors on a composite monitor, and HN praises it for showing how developers took advantage of the smeared signal.

    4. 4
      20:49

      How Prince of Persia Defeated Apple II's Memory Limitations | War Stories | Ars Technica

      Ars Technica · 1.5M views · 6 years ago

      Jordan Mechner on rotoscoped animation and memory tricks on a dying platform, which HN calls essential viewing for game history.

    5. 5
      1:25:34

      8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box

      GDC Festival of Gaming · 569K views · 9 years ago

      The highest-scored video in game history on HN: LucasArts artist Mark Ferrari animating whole scenes with nothing but palette cycling.

    6. 6
      1:01:07

      The Ultimate Game Boy Talk (33c3)

      media.ccc.de · 242K views · 9 years ago

      Michael Steil explains nearly the whole handheld in an hour, and HN tells would-be emulator authors to watch it first.

    7. 7
      1:22:13

      HandmadeCon 2016 - History of Software Texture Mapping in Games

      Molly Rocket · 15K views · 9 years ago

      Hecker, Barrett and others tell the oral history of how 90s PCs drew textured 3D with no GPU, a rarely watched first-hand account.

    8. 8
      3:05

      Why does PUNCHING Sonic 3D trigger a Secret Level Select?

      Coding Secrets · 510K views · 6 years ago

      A three-minute anecdote about a crash handler that sends a CPU fault to the level select, a small example of the kind of defensive engineering the next video relies on.

    9. 9
      31:37

      How Crash Bandicoot Hacked The Original Playstation | War Stories | Ars Technica

      Ars Technica · 5.2M views · 6 years ago

      The centerpiece and one of HN's most recommended dev stories: Andy Gavin overwriting Sony's own libraries in RAM to make room for his game.

    10. 10
      20:08

      Fast Inverse Square Root — A Quake III Algorithm

      Nemean · 6M views · 5 years ago

      The most famous single trick of the era, 0x5f3759df, explained clearly enough that HN commenters say it finally made sense.

    11. 11
      18:20

      FIXING the ENTIRE SM64 Source Code (INSANE N64 performance)

      Kaze Emanuar · 3.2M views · 4 years ago

      A modern coda: Kaze Emanuar finds bus contention and other N64 bottlenecks and makes Mario 64 render up to six times faster on real hardware.

    12. 12
      12:04

      How we fit an NES game into 40 Kilobytes

      Morphcat Games · 3.7M views · 8 years ago

      It ends in 2018 with a studio that chose the NES's limits on purpose, the video HN links whenever someone asks how old games were so small.