Trespasser: Jurassic Park CG Source Code Review

Jurassic Park: Trespasser is an unique piece of software: It is a game that has managed to reach both infamous and cult status.
Released in October 1998 after a three years development cycle, it was unanimously destroyed by critics. But it did not fail by much and managed to grow an impressive mass of fans that wrote editors, released patches, reverse-engineered the assets, added features, produced new dinosaurs, levels and even started a remake. 20 years later, bloggers still write about it and the post-mortem by Richard Wyckoff is one of the most fascinating behind-the-scene tale I have ever read.
From...

Go's error handling doesn't sit right with me

I’ll open up by saying that I am not a language designer, and I do like a lot of things about Go. I just recently figured out how to describe why Go’s error handling mechanics don’t sit right with me.

If you aren’t familiar with Go, here’s an example of how Go programmers might do error handling:

result, err := SomethingThatMightGoWrong()
if err != nil {
    // Handle error
}
// Proceed

Let’s extrapolate this:

func MightFail() {
    result, err := doStuffA()
    if err != nil {
        // Error handling...


						
						Drew DeVault's blog
						

							Posted at 2014-06-07 00:00:00 | Software | read on
						
					

2014-05-01

ubase 0.1 released: download

Git Source Code Review

Since its release in December 2005, git has taken over the software industry. In combination with GitHub it is now a powerful tool to publish and share code: From big teams (linux kernel, id Software, Epic Unreal) to single individual (Prince of Persia, Another world, Rick Dangerous), many have adopted it as their main SCM.
I wanted to get a better understanding of the "stupid content tracker" and see how it was built so I spent a few weeks in my spare time reading the source code. I found it tiny, tidy, well-documented and overall pleasant to read.
As usual I...

The Computer Graphics Library

Back in the 90s, one book was ubiquitous in the world of Computer Graphics. Commonly called "The CG Bible", Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice gathered a huge part of the knowledge of the time. It was commonly referenced by the best programmers of that era in interviews and articles. By 1998, the book popularity had been acknowledged with a Front Line Award.
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Hacking on your TI calculator

I’ve built the KnightOS kernel, an open-source OS that runs on several TI calculator models, including the popular TI-83+ family, and recently the new TI-84+ Color Silver Edition. I have published some information on how to build your own operating sytsems for these devices, but I’ve learned a lot since then and I’m writing this blog post to include the lessons I’ve learned from other attempts.

Coming into this, you should be comforable with z80 assembly. It’s possible to write an OS for these devices in C (and perhaps other high-level languages), but proficiency in z80 assembly is still required. Additionally, I don’t consider C a viable...

Algorithms and Data structures books: One size doesn't fit them all

Over the years running this moderately popular website, I have been asked many times what is the best book about Algorithms and Data Structures. The answer is always "It depends" ! It depends on how the programmer's brain works and what kind of notation he is comfortable with. There are many flavors of mindset out there but it usually comes down to Mathematics and Illustrations...

Welcome, 2014

So 2013 is finally over and it's been an energy-sapping year, business-, baby-, and building wise. Business. The stagnation that was present for pretty much the first half of the year and which forced us to downsize a bit, had been replaced by too many projects all at once in the 2nd half of the year. And while it was welcome since it saved us from closing doors, it prevented working on our private projects, i.e. our apps in the store, but also personal pet projects – let alone anything open source. Baby. After 7 horrible months between Lara Marie's...

The bug that hides from breakpoints

This is the story of the most difficult bug I ever had to solve. See if you can figure it out before the conclusion.

For some years now, I’ve worked on a kernel for Texas Instruments calculators called KnightOS. This kernel is written entirely in assembly, and targets the old-school z80 processor from back in 1976. This classic processor was built without any concept of protection rings. It’s an 8-bit processor, with 150-some instructions and (in this application) 32K of RAM and 32K of Flash. This stuff is so old, I ended up writing most of the KnightOS toolchain from scratch rather than try to get archaic assemblers and...

2014-01-21

tabbed 0.6 released: download