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Comments (53)

  • evilturnip
    Masters of Doom is a great book on the history of id software, which includes the origins of the development of smooth scrolling by Carmack and Romero, which was groundbreaking at the time on PC.
  • LarsDu88
    Lovely book. Skimming through it. One thing that might help contextualize it is a brief discussion of the how contemporary hardware like the SNES rendered sprites so efficiently compared to the PC hardware at the time. It's not obvious to modern readers why a PC with significantly more powerful compute capabilities would struggle to keep up with significantly slower Nintendo hardware at the time for sprite rendering.
  • woutersf
    If you want to play it you can do that here: https://www.playdosgames.com/play/commander-keen-4
  • LarsDu88
    Someone ping Fabien Sanglard! Looks so much like his site!
  • pan69
    Great write up. Reminds me of Cosmodoc, which is similar source but analyzes Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure instead of Commander Keen.https://cosmodoc.org
  • bluedino
    Would love to hear about the other Apogee and Epic games, like Epic Pinball, Tyrain, Halloween Harry, Jill of the Jungle, Duke Nukem...
  • jzelinskie
    Sorry for the "asking for more"-style comment, but it would be amazing if this came in epub and not just PDF.
  • ChrisArchitect
    Of related interest:Reconstructed Commander Keen 1-3 Source Codehttps://pckf.com/viewtopic.php?t=18248 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46321982)
  • ForHackernews
    Another game from the same era: https://cosmodoc.org/
  • nnnnico
    this looks like a copy of fabien's site, plus the topic is very related and likely trampolining on his brand :/
  • doctorpangloss
    Have LLMs made all arcana about games engineering meaningless?