Learning Legendary Hardware

If you love software, you also try to understand the hardware to the deep down. It is not an easy task : There are many great programming books but few that explains hardware very well (as Michael Abrash once wrote: the Intel Documentation is "slightly more fun to read than the phone book"). In my quest for knowledge, I found two hardware books to be outstanding:
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software.
Computer Organization and Design.
Those books are good for "current" hardware but there is a lot to learn from previous generations. The cult machine That Wouldn't Die,...

Decyphering the Business Card Raytracer

I recently came across Paul Heckbert's business card raytracer. For those that have never heard of it: It is a very famous challenge in the Computer Graphics field that started on May 4th, 1984 via a post on comp.graphics by Paul Heckbert ( More about this in his article "A Minimal Ray Tracer" from the book Graphics Gems IV).
The goal was to produce the source code for a raytracer...that would fit on the back of a business card.
Andrew Kensler's version is mesmerizing and one of the greatest hack that I have seen. Since I am curious, I decided to...

More Doom III BFG Documentation

id Software developer Jan Paul Van Waveren (a.k.a Mr Elusive) is sharing some more of the knowledge gained while working on Doom 3 BFG. This part focuses highly on the choice of data-structures and how paramount cacheline are to performances.

Doom III BFG Documentation

id Software developer Jan Paul Van Waveren (a.k.a Mr Elusive) send me his technical notes about Doom 3 BFG. I was especially interested in the "Compute vs. Memory" section which confirms that CPU are now so fast that it is often better to calculate something than fetch it from RAM.
Jan Paul was also kind enough to share a list of all the publications related to idTech4 engine (see bottom of this page).
More...

Custom Music Syncing on Android

I have an HTC One, with CyanogenMod installed. I usually use Spotify, but I’ve been wanting to move away from it for a while. The biggest thing keeping me there was the ease of syncing up with my phone - I added music on my PC and it just showed up on my phone.

So, I finally decided to make it work on my phone without Spotify. You might have success if you aren’t using CyanogenMod, but you definitely need to be rooted and you need to access a root shell on your phone. I was using adb shell to start with, but it has...

You don't need jQuery

It’s true. You really don’t need jQuery. Modern web browsers can do most of what you want from jQuery, without jQuery.

For example, take MediaCrush. It’s a website I spent some time working on with a friend. It’s actually quite sophisticated - drag-and-drop uploading, uploading via a hidden form, events wired up to links and dynamically generated content, and ajax requests/file uploads, the whole she-bang. It does all of that without jQuery. It’s open source, if you’re looking for a good example of how all of this can be used in the wild.

Let’s walk through some of the things you like jQuery for, and I’ll show...

Second Reality Code Review

On July 23, 2013 the source code of Second Reality was released. Like many, I was eager to look at the internals of a demo that inspired me so much over the last 20 years.
I was expecting a monolithic mess of assembly but instead I found a surprisingly elaborated architecture, mixing several languages in an elegant way. The code is something like I had never seen before that perfectly represents two essential aspects of demomaking :
Team work.
Obfuscation.
As usual I have cleaned up my notes into an article: I hope it will save some a few...

The state of things in 2013

Salut! I didn't blog for quite a while, since – as I've mentioned before – these days, Facebook seems to me the more appropriate forum for shorter status messages. That aside, let me recap how things are these days. Since the birth of Lara Marie, quite a lot in my life has changed. I haven't been contributing to any open source projects nor did I have time to continue my writing of articles and books. This leaves me being quite unsatisfied. Business-wise, my iOS/Android-company had to struggle a bit in late 2012, since a lot of clients cancelled or postponed...

2013-06-16

sic 1.2 released: download

Prince Of Persia Code Review

On Apr 17, 2012 Jordan Mechner released the source code of Prince of Persia. I immediately took at look at it!