Old Yoda Coder. Co-coded Reality Construction Kit game engine on Commodore Amiga. Making #MoonDogsArcade (indiedev 1990-1996) FullyBandaged Autistic Aphantasia
England.
Joined November 2012
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Cal retweeted
AC/DC abre el Monsters of Rock de Donington en 1991 con “Thunderstruck” y el concierto se convierte en una de las imágenes más claras de su legado.
Angus Young entra con el riff de siempre, caminando en el sitio mientras toca. Chris Slade golpea la batería con esa energía que define a la banda.
El público responde al instante…. Brian Johnson sale corriendo y grita “Thunder”.
Es el estilo que AC/DC lleva décadas sosteniendo: riffs simples, ritmo que no se detiene y una presencia en el escenario que no necesita adornos. En Donington, ante una multitud enorme, suena igual de directo que en un disco.
El legado de la banda está en esa consistencia. Décadas de la misma fórmula, la misma intensidad y la misma capacidad de convertir un concierto en una fiesta. “Thunderstruck” no es solo un tema de apertura. Es la prueba de que el hard rock de AC/DC sigue funcionando cuando se toca en vivo, sin filtros y con la misma fuerza que en los 80.
En Donington 1991 se ve por qué AC/DC sigue siendo referencia: No cambian el sonido para el escenario, pese a que el escenario esté con más de 75mil personas… El legado de la banda y el concierto quedan en el mismo lugar.
¿Eres un fan de AC/DC o al menos alguien que lo mantiene en sus listas de música?
¡Thunder! ⚡️🎶⚡️🎶⚡️🎶
Cal retweeted
Morning everyone I hope you are well. In between the showers overlooking Chapel Stile Church with the Langdales as the backdrop. Have a great day.
#LakeDistrict
Cal retweeted
Current measurements show an absolute magnitude of 2.9 which makes it brighter, and potentially larger than Ceres. But further observations are needed across the spectrum to get a better handle on its properties. This will be another mini world on the edge of our solar system
Did we find a new dwarf planet?
@VRubinObs has revealed a new dwarf planet candidate that orbits our Sun beyond Pluto! And it may be among the largest and brightest objects discovered in this region of the Solar System: stanford.io/4exr85u
ALT This image shows the orbital pathway of newly discovered dwarf planet candidate 2026 ED138 (ED138), as observed by NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory. This image is a composite of multiple images captured by Rubin between 4 March and 11 July 2026 at intervals indicated by the teal circles. ED138 is visible at the center of each circle. ED138 was found by Rubin Operations team member and in-Kind contributor Matthew Holman (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian), who contributes to improving Rubin's algorithms that search for distant moving objects in our Solar System. Its distance from the Sun places it beyond the orbit of Pluto, and initial analysis indicates that it may be among the largest and brightest bodies scientists have discovered in this region of the Solar System. Credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA Image Processing: M. Jurić (UW), D. de Martin & M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab)
Cal retweeted
Click the link and turn it up to 11!
Welcome to the Mesmoscene: Our love letter to the 80s/90s demoscene, built with #threejs, #WebGPU and TSL
labs.mesmotronic.com/three-m…
#Demoscene #AtariST #Amiga
Cal retweeted
Since 1979 I've saved many documents and relics from my gaming journey. My name is Tim Stamper, I'm the co-founder of Ultimate Play The Game, Rare and FortuneFish.
It's finally time to let go of my reputation for secrecy... 👀
Cal retweeted
If you take 100 mg of melatonin 1-2 hours before a CT (CAT scan) or PET scan gives you protection from radiation exposure during the scan‼️
Cal retweeted
A PET scan finds cancer by injecting you with radioactive glucose and watching where it goes.
The tumour lights up like a Christmas tree.
The healthy tissue does not.
The machine that diagnoses your cancer is, mechanically, a sugar detector. The thing it is detecting is the thing the cancer is eating.
Your oncologist will then hand you a leaflet recommending complex carbohydrates as part of a balanced recovery diet.
Read that twice.
Cal retweeted
#msx2rockcityのゲーム会社時代のつぶやき #グラディウス
おそらくグラⅣの中でも最も凝ったボスで、人気も高いボスである高速ステージのローリングコアのソースが見つかったので、当たり判定ボックスシューティングで再現してみた
7面ー高速ステージの担当は私でしたが、ボスは私と入れ替わりに退職していった方のプログラムです
Cal retweeted
One of the best things about indie games is that nobody asked for them. No meeting of people in suits decided your game should exist. You just wanted to make something cool that you love. Never forget that's your biggest strength
You're indie. Be weird, be raw, be authentic! ❤️
Cal retweeted
Who remembers Cauldron on the ZX Spectrum.
spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entr…
It looks much better with bordered sprites and a small engine rewrite by an AI tool!
And it runs on the Spectrum Next wonderfully.
All the nostalgia, and only rose tinted a tiny amount for modern times!
Cal retweeted
Server side on the ZXDB browser is doing a fair amount of heavy lifting. Its grabbing the games from their zip files and, because the Spectranet only supports tap and sna it'll attempt to auto convert tzx and z80 before download too (can't guarantee that'll always work though).
Cal retweeted
A guy offered a little high five on the escalator, and the wholesome reactions from strangers are so precious.
Cal retweeted
Added more graphics settings. Default = everything on = hits 90Hz on Steam Deck OLED and 60Hz on iPhone 15 Pro.
This video shows how all the lighting settings impact the image. Sky occlusion is the most impactful. Claybook didn't have it.
Cal retweeted
At Ensemble Studios, a coworker (who later went to id) and I would work on laborious, janitor-like tasks for months on end. A lot of mind numbing low-level console porting work, asset optimization, shader and engine optimization, etc. AI would have made this much faster.
The Age 3->Xbox 360 port and especially the low-level networking rewrite/bring-up (which I did) was particularly brutal.
I'm not sure a lot of people understand what game coders actually do. We're not spending 9 hours a day finely hand crafting artisan software and expressing our inner dreams... 90% of the time we are fighting compilers and existing architecture, having to work out how undocumented code works, and tracking down obscure bugs and behavioural issues.
Most of game programming is just difficult, tedious, laborious grunt work, and the cognitive load we have to endure to get anything done is tiring and frustrating. No game coder is doing it for this 90% of the job.
We make games because the 10% that IS actually about making things fun and expressing ourselves is so incredibly rewarding it makes the other 90% bearable.
Now imagine if there was a tool, some kind of AI agent maybe, which could do most of the 90% grunt work for you, leaving you to just make all the decisions and express your creativity. How amazing would that be. How completely revolutionary would that be.
Cal retweeted
22 kilobytes.
I often think about the technical limitations that game designers had to work with in the 80s - both in terms of software and hardware. To me, the game that stands at the very top is Elite (1984).
Elite is smaller in data size than many modern text files or desktop icons, yet it lets you freely explore a multi-galaxy-spanning universe that felt gigantic and virtually limitless.
Think about this for a second: The core game code on the BBC Micro version has roughly 22 KB of memory. The C64 version from 1985, which I played as a kid, isn't much bigger.
Now think about what Braben and Bell turned those few kilobytes into: a massive universe with eight galaxies, each containing 256 star systems (for a total of 2,048 planets per system). Each system featured unique details: government type, economy, technology level, population, commodity prices, and even descriptive text.
Oh, and by the way, the game also rendered 3D wireframe ships, stations, and planets in real time on a 2 MHz 6502 processor.
This is no slight on today’s game designers. They work with what they have, and that's okay. But when I think about the worlds that some old school programmers created with the tools they were given, it sometimes breaks my brain trying to to even remotely understand how they did it.
Not megabytes, not gigabytes... kilobytes!
Cal retweeted
Cobra is one of my favourite #movie tie-ins on the #ZXSpectrum
The smooth, parallax scrolling still holds up today and the humour and spot-effects are equally brilliant.
It's just a superbly crafted game courtesy of the genius of Jof.
#retrogames
Cal retweeted
Hidden in plain sight.
80s developers often went beyond what was generally accepted as a system's limit. They were true pioneers, pushing systems way beyond their initial hardware restrictions.
Geoff Crammond is probably best known for his stroke of genius when designing the Formula One Grand Prix games. However, his talent was visible much earlier when his game Revs (1985) was released.
The most remarkable thing about it was how it hid code in the sky and used extreme memory-packing tricks on a 32KB 8-bit machine. Because of the BBC Micro’s memory limits, Crammond stored part of the actual game code inside the screen memory area.
Normally this would show up as garbage pixels. Instead, he used timer-based palette tricks so those “garbage code pixels” were forced to blue. They disappeared into the sky and became invisible during play.This is the famous “code in the sky” technique.
Revs is widely regarded as a landmark of 8-bit programming efficiency and a key ancestor of modern sim racing.