The folks over at 8-bit workshop have some neat resources. Learn to write 8-bit code for a ton of old standup arcades and tv console systems – right from your browser.
I’m personally a big fan of the 6502 Vector systems, but these are available for you to try out
Time for me to shake my fist and tell you darn kids to get off my lawn. Lets set the wayback machine to the 1980’s…
Ralph Koster shares the first video game he ever wrote as well as a great flashback to what almost everyone that wanted to learn to program did back in the 80’s and 90’s. We typed in long programs by hand from books we got at the library and computer magazines. We taught ourselves BASIC and smatterings of assembly. If you were really cool, you even tried to sell your games: which was done by copying them to a floppy, printing a dot-matrix label for it, and trying to sell it in a ziplock baggie.
I started by fiddling around with the programs I typed in to see if I could change them or make them do different things.
My very first video ‘game’ on my TSR-80 consisted of a bunch of black and white dots that would fall down from the top of the screen, and you moved your dot ‘ship’ back and forth to avoid them as the enemies rained down. They came down one at a time. Ridiculously slowly. But it was probably my very first ‘game’.
My second, more ‘real’ game was a castle adventure game. You were the sole heir of a long-lost uncle and had to search his castle to find the deed within 24 hours. It was a text adventure at its heart, but there was opening graphics. I even wrote my own graphics editor with which I drew those opening screens. I believe I still have the graph paper I used.
Anyway, for anyone who learned to program in the 80’s, Koster’s video will tug some familiar heartstrings. For you younger kids, this is how it was done back in the day…
Signed distance field rendering is a technique used in Team Fortress 2, and documented by Chris Green of Valve in the SIGGRAPH 2007 paper Improved Alpha-Tested Magnification for Vector Textures and Special Effects. It allows you to render bitmap fonts without jagged edges even at high magnifications. This article describes how to implement the technique in libgdx.
There is a clever little trick that one can use for a variety of purposes on Linux. It involves overriding or hijacking function calls. It’s called LD_PRELOAD.
Lets say you create a file called unrandom.c that includes an implementation of the rand() function. It matches the function rand() in standard C.
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int rand(){ return 42; //the most random number in the universe} |
We’ll compile it into a shared library.
gcc -shared -fPIC unrandom.c -o unrandom.so
Now… just run a program (my_program) that uses random numbers like this, and you’ll find that the rand function only generates 42.
LD_PRELOAD=$PWD/unrandom.so ./my_program
This trick can be used in a variety of ways. A good write-up can be found here, and is worth a read:
Dynamic linker tricks: Using LD_PRELOAD to cheat, inject features and investigate programs
Remember the arcade game Asteroids or the vector-based Star Wars arcade game? How about the vector-graphics based Vectrix game console?
Say hello to LaserOS. It that allows you build really cool, high quality vector graphics dreams – on real laser projectors. You can build visual laser shows, visualizations, control and create musical compositions, and play some great old games.
Here’s a developer that re-created Asteroids with a high-quality laser system (bonus points for talking about the difficulty of the traveling salesman problem):
Here’s one reviewer giving LaserOS a go on his laser projector:
New and updated for 2018
If you see this when compiling an Ubuntu or other kernel (my case was a Yocto kernel on an Ubuntu 17.04 distro)
...
CHK include/generated/uapi/linux/version.h
CHK include/generated/utsrelease.h
CC scripts/mod/empty.o
/usr/src/linux-4.4/scripts/mod/empty.c:1:0: error: code model kernel does not support PIC mode
/* empty file to figure out endianness / word size */
Then the issue is with your gcc installation. In gcc 6+ versions, PIE (position independent executables) is enabled by default. So in order to compile you need to disable it. Even gcc 5 has the issue. This is a known bug for gcc. Bug Link.
So far there is no official patch from gcc side, so the workaround is to patch the Makefile of kernel source.
If you are familiar with patching the source file use the codes from this link to create the patch file then try to compile.Patch File
Here’s the patch to add to your kernel Makefile to disable PIE compiling.
diff –git a/Makefile b/Makefile
index 5c18baa..e342473 100644
— a/Makefile
+++ b/Makefile
@@ -612,6 +612,12 @@ endif # $(dot-config)
# Defaults to vmlinux, but the arch makefile usually adds further targets
all: vmlinux+# force no-pie for distro compilers that enable pie by default
+KBUILD_CFLAGS += $(call cc-option, -fno-pie)
+KBUILD_CFLAGS += $(call cc-option, -no-pie)
+KBUILD_AFLAGS += $(call cc-option, -fno-pie)
+KBUILD_CPPFLAGS += $(call cc-option, -fno-pie)# The arch Makefile can set ARCH_{CPP,A,C}FLAGS to override the default
# values of the respective KBUILD_* variables
ARCH_CPPFLAGS :=
Game studios and enthusiasts may soon have a new tool at their disposal to speed up game development and experiment with different styles of play. Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have developed a new approach using an artificial intelligence to learn a complete game engine.
Their AI system watches less than two minutes of gameplay video and then builds its own model of how the game operates by studying the frames and making predictions of future events, such as what path a character will choose or how enemies might react.
Learn more here:
https://gvu.gatech.edu/ai-uses-less-two-minutes-videogame-footage-recreate-game-engine
YOLO is a real-time object detection system. On a Titan X it processes images at 40-90 FPS, and it has a pretty nifty demo reel too. 🙂
One of the key mathematical foundations of machine learning is using gradient descent to find maxima and minima in a multi-dimensional data set. Gradient descent is good, but getting the most out of it can sometimes leave you wringing your hands or doing a lot of painful mathematical investigation and analysis. Investigations that can quickly tax even a mathematics major.
Sergui Puscas shows us a different, more intuitive way to find maxima and minima by using swarming and flocking techniques. It’s a pretty fun read.