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The wiki of Guitar Hero simulator Clone Hero has extensive information on controllers [1]. Some of them can still be purchased brand new but overall the most popular option seems t…

It's slightly more complicated than that. The PlayStation's geometry pipeline uses fixed-point coordinates with a decent amount of fractional precision (12 bits), however the GPU l…

An overhaul of my original PlayStation bare-metal programming tutorial repo: https://github.com/spicyjpeg/ps1-bare-metal It was never really meant to be an SDK of sorts that other …

The same way it's done now with current generation consoles: the manufacturer would provide you with SDKs and development hardware once you paid them a decent chunk of money and si…

I am still amazed my own minimalist PS1 tutorial series [1] became as popular as it did, given that prior to it basically all learning material on the internet was written around t…

On the PS1 it's actually slightly more complex than that. The CPU does support up to 16 MB of main RAM (development kits and PS1-based arcade systems did come fitted with more than…

It does. The SPU only handles decoding and playback of ADPCM samples from its own memory and receives all CD audio from an I2S bus; the CD-ROM sector decoder chip handles XA-ADPCM …

I would recommend trying out Snow ( https://snowemu.com/ ), a somewhat recently released 68000 Macintosh emulator that is cross-platform and focuses on low-level accuracy, unlike p…

The "hard work" in question is a death sentence for computing as we know it today. All implementations of zero-knowledge proofs require device integrity assurance to prevent the ot…

In case anybody here is interested, a few years ago I put together a similar (albeit far less comprehensive) resource on original PlayStation programming [1], exploring the GPU, ge…

Almost all IDE and SCSI CD-ROM drives were indeed capable of playing audio CDs fully autonomously, with the host PC basically only sending them the command to start playing; many d…

Solutions based on zero-knowledge-proofs would solve the privacy aspect at the massive cost of killing general purpose computing as we know it today, by mandating the use of remote…

The even worse part about PayPal is that they have a whole system of nonsensical fees to fall back to when you inevitably figure out how to evade the obvious ones. For instance, si…

A similar, even higher profile case that shook the electronics industry around a decade ago was chip manufacturer FTDI releasing an update to their drivers that would detect and se…

Plenty of low-volume industrial software has never really moved on from security dongles. Most modern arcade games for instance still rely on a USB dongle to decrypt game files [1]…

Bayer dithering was also employed heavily on the original PlayStation. The PS1's GPU was capable of Gouraud shading with 24-bit color precision, but the limited capacity (1 MB) and…

While great on paper, zero-knowledge-proof based systems unfortunately have a fatal flaw. Due to the fully anonymous nature of verification tokens, implementations must have safegu…

If we truly want to point out the ridiculousness of Italian tech regulations, the influencers' registry, the temporary ChatGPT ban from a few years back or even the new AI regulati…

Custom Flash players were actually relatively common in game development during the mid to late 2000s, as Flash provided a ready-to-go authoring solution for UI and 2D animation th…

It is actually much worse than that. Much like banking, the push for digital government services in many countries has ended up more or less requiring every citizen to own an up-to…

It's not just a multiplication instruction. The CPU is equipped with a fixed-point coprocessor to accelerate the most common computations in 3D games, the geometry transformation e…

It has been enabled mainly by the the advent of streamlined tooling to assist with 1:1 byte-by-byte matching decompilations ( https://decomp.me/ comes to mind), which allows new pr…

The PS1's GPU does not support perspective correction at all; it doesn't even receive homogeneous 3D vertex coordinates, instead operating entirely in 2D screen space and leaving b…

If anybody here wants to learn more about console graphics specifically, I think the original PlayStation is a good starting point since it's basically the earliest and simplest 3D…