8086 emulator
8086 emulator is a fun Intel 8086 emulator / vm on github. It can run most of the 8086 instruction set and provides an interactive interpreter and debugger that allows you to run programs line by line. [hackaday]
Stable 3D dithering
Runevision invented a form of dithering called surface-stable fractal dithering.
He released it as open source along with this video showing how it works:
Find the shader source and example project here: https://github.com/runevision/Dither3D
Putting spell check in 64k of RAM
Abhinav Upadhyay walks us through a wonderful bit of computer history. He talks about how Steve Johnson at AT&T wrote one of the first spell checkers. His method could encode a word in just 14 bits of memory; so a dictionary with 30,000 entries would take up a fraction under 52 kB. This is even better compression than gzip – and it can perform fast lookups.
Once the dictionary grew to 30,000 words, the Bloom filter approach became impractical. Douglas McIlroy’s solution was to store differences between sorted hash codes , after discovering these differences followed a geometric distribution. These followed a distribution that could be easily run length encoded with something called Golomb’s code.
It’s a fantastic examination of applied computer science. Definitely worth a read
Articles:
What the demo Scene teaches us
Plastic 195/95 is a 20mb demo made by a demo team on their picoEngine v2.1b in 2009
Not to be outdone, RGBA 195/95 is the same demo – done in 64k
These were shared in a presentation on lessons learned from Demo Scene coding:
Current state of GPU programming
3D ASCII rendering
Unusual rendering styles has become very popular lately. In this video, Acerola tries to write an ASCII based 3D rendering shader. Very interesting.
GPU programming chaos
GPU programming used to be just about rendering graphics. As we’ve moved into bitcoin mining and AI, eisfrosch goes over the current chaotic programming environments for GPUs.
Re-creating PS1 graphics with modern hardware
Acerola has a bunch of great graphics videos. In this one, he talks about why PS1 graphics looked the way it did.
I learned that PS1 actually had realtime camera distance tessellation – something that wasn’t available to desktop GPUs until the introduction of tessellation shaders.
Edge shading
Gamelogic does a decent intro to a few simple edge detection shaders used in toon-style rendering.
2.5D ASCII art concept
8 years ago Tenkai Games Dev Room made a cool ASCII nethack-like prototype, and has only gotten like 60k views. It’s amazing how things like this exist yet nobody has seen them.