12 videos · 6 hr 14 minCheating the Hardware
HN never gets tired of stories about game developers beating hardware that should not have been able to run their game. This playlist goes in rough order of the hardware: vector monitors, CGA, the Apple II, 8-bit palettes, the Game Boy, the 90s software renderers, the PlayStation and N64. It ends with modern programmers who go back to old consoles by choice.
Play all on YouTube- 17:08
How "oldschool" graphics worked Part 1 - Commodore and Nintendo
The 8-Bit Guy · Picked by 4 · 2015–2019A seven-minute primer on sprites, attribute grids and palettes that gives you the vocabulary for everything after it.
- 220:57
Atari's Quadrascan Explained
Retro Game Mechanics Explained · Picked by 3 · 2021–2026Before pixels were cheap, Asteroids and Tempest drew with an electron beam, and HN's pick for how that vector hardware worked is this one.
- 311:27
CGA Graphics - Not as bad as you thought!
The 8-Bit Guy · Picked by 6 · 2016–2024The 1981 IBM PC's four-color mode turns out to give more colors on a composite monitor, and HN praises it for showing how developers took advantage of the smeared signal.
- 420:49
How Prince of Persia Defeated Apple II's Memory Limitations | War Stories | Ars Technica
Ars Technica · Picked by 5 · 2020–2026Jordan Mechner on rotoscoped animation and memory tricks on a dying platform, which HN calls essential viewing for game history.
- 5
1:25:348 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box
GDC Festival of Gaming · Picked by 13 · 2018–2026The highest-scored video in game history on HN: LucasArts artist Mark Ferrari animating whole scenes with nothing but palette cycling.
- 6
1:01:07The Ultimate Game Boy Talk (33c3)
media.ccc.de · Picked by 10 · 2017–2026Michael Steil explains nearly the whole handheld in an hour, and HN tells would-be emulator authors to watch it first.
- 7
1:22:13HandmadeCon 2016 - History of Software Texture Mapping in Games
Molly Rocket · Picked by 2 · 2021–2022Hecker, Barrett and others tell the oral history of how 90s PCs drew textured 3D with no GPU, a rarely watched first-hand account.
- 8
3:05Why does PUNCHING Sonic 3D trigger a Secret Level Select?
Coding Secrets · Picked by 2 · 2021–2023A three-minute anecdote about a crash handler that sends a CPU fault to the level select, a small example of the kind of defensive engineering the next video relies on.
- 9
31:37How Crash Bandicoot Hacked The Original Playstation | War Stories | Ars Technica
Ars Technica · Picked by 13 · 2020–2026The centerpiece and one of HN's most recommended dev stories: Andy Gavin overwriting Sony's own libraries in RAM to make room for his game.
- 10
20:08Fast Inverse Square Root — A Quake III Algorithm
Nemean · Picked by 3 · 2021–2022The most famous single trick of the era, 0x5f3759df, explained clearly enough that HN commenters say it finally made sense.
- 11
18:20FIXING the ENTIRE SM64 Source Code (INSANE N64 performance)
Kaze Emanuar · Picked by 7 · 2022–2025A modern coda: Kaze Emanuar finds bus contention and other N64 bottlenecks and makes Mario 64 render up to six times faster on real hardware.
- 12
12:04How we fit an NES game into 40 Kilobytes
Morphcat Games · Picked by 6 · 2019–2026It ends in 2018 with a studio that chose the NES's limits on purpose, the video HN links whenever someone asks how old games were so small.