Retro Computing

Entombed in a Raycaster

Stelios Petrakis describes building a C raycaster around the maze generation algorithm of the Atari 2600 game Entombed (1983), whose mysterious lookup table builds the maze one row at a time within 128 bytes of RAM, then reskinning it as a Backrooms-style game with a browser-playable Three.js version.

Blog post · Game Development · Retro Computing · Algorithms · Graphics

Resurrecting iChat Audio and Video Conferencing

Chris Jones explains how he got Apple iChat AV audio and video calls working again on Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard: with old network captures and LLM help he reverse engineered the dead SNATMAP NAT-discovery service, wrote a small UDP replacement server, and now one /etc/hosts line points old Macs at his public instance or a self-hosted one.

Blog post · Retro Computing · Apple · Networking · Reverse Engineering