I stumbled across a 3-episode podcast (really 2 and a quarter because the second audio file is cut short) relating to an ancient 3D game graphics engine from 2008: http://egtpm.blogspot.com/2009/06/20080605egtpodcst-e3.html It's interesting to hear these folks talking about the future features of their game engine. Little did they know dark times were waiting in the … Continue reading An Ancient Game Engine Time Capsule →

I love Sublime Text, but I can feel the death by a thousand paper cuts beginning. After a product has been on the market for long enough, the people developing it tend to stop caring about the user experience. Today I wanted to stop Sublime Text from zooming in any time I accidentally held down … Continue reading To use our product, just create a config file in an obscure directory →

The wishbone bus is an open-specification for a hardware protocol for connecting two hardware devices. These could be CPUs, RAMs, GPUs, USB controllers, whatever. It was created out of necessity by the open-source-hardware community, since the existing bus protocol standards are all locked down with patents, copyright, and trademarks. It seems to me that a … Continue reading Wishbone Bus →

I've been looking at various open-source RISC-V cores to hook up to the 2D sprite renderer I've been working on, and it looks like Rocket Chip is the way to go, since it's so highly-configurable. That's perfect for me, because game system cores have always been highly custom. Let's see what it takes to build … Continue reading Let’s Build a Rocket Chip →

I've been following Will Green's excellent FPGA VGA Graphics in Verilog series, wherein he creates a VGA output block in Verilog, and displays some sprites on the screen. I wanted to do away with the need for physical hardware, and simulate the VGA generator entirely (I gotta have my end-to-end testing!) using Icarus Verilog. So … Continue reading Capturing frames from a simulated HDL VGA generator →

This is an interesting FPGA project: http://www.electronics-lab.com/ultraminer-fpga-affordable-16-nm-xilinx-fpga-dev-board-crypto-mining/ It's 100% dedicated to mining. No GPIOs (that I can see), no external interfaces other than a (relatively) low-speed USB (probably 2.0) port. I'm not planning on getting into crypto mining, but the board might be an inexpensive interesting to prototype larger hardware designs and then move to … Continue reading Interesting FPGA Project →

When I started this blog, I had this crazy idea that I'd do everything in Microsoft Word, on Windows 10, and publish on WordPress.com. Some people push the limits of that open-source free-software life, I wanted to push the limits of ease-of-use and comfort. I'm calling the experiment a failure, kind of. Microsoft Word is … Continue reading Microsoft Word is not a Great Blogging Platform →

I've been bookmarking interesting articles. Tons of interesting articles. Any by "bookmarking" I mean emailing them to myself while sitting on the train on my way to work. "Ooo that looks interesting" *email to myself* At present, I have about 300 emails in my inbox, from myself. I pretty much delete everything else. I want … Continue reading Things I Plan on Blogging About but Probably Won’t →

I randomly remembered the title of one of the first blogs I read as a kid. (Probably because it mentioned Gameboy Advance programming). I googled the name, and there was exactly one result: An old list of blogs that happened to link to it. The original website is long gone. I had to go to … Continue reading Internet Archive →