Live data from Hacker News

Great books on classic video games

bossfightbooks.com

61–64 of 64 posts

Re: Great books on classic video games

#61
post #12

Not sure what's in them because I can't find their Table of Contents, but if you're looking for other great books on specific games: 1. Masters of Doom 2. Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book

> 2. Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book I'd temper one's expectations on this one. It's a massive, unwieldy book, mostly speaking to old PC VGA graphics programming techniques, in pages taken verbatim from Abrash's previous Zen of Graphics Programming book. It definitely isn't focused on a specific game, but it does go a bit into the BSP tree stuff used in Doom, if memory serves. Maybe it's just because…

VGA Mode is where the fun's at.

Yeah, the start is essentially Zen of Code Optimization, which was also a great book, but pretty much dated in 2021... but it's interesting to see how he thinks. The best thing to take away is not about picking the right instructions, but to use your brain to pick the right algorithms and use benchmarks

Re: Great books on classic video games

#63
Very nice, and you might like these lists too:

The Best Books For Understanding The Video Game Industry By Doug Walsh (who wrote over one hundred officially licensed video game strategy guides) https://shepherd.com/best-books/the-video-game-industry

or

The Best Video Game Narrative Histories And A Couple Of Others By Harold Goldberg, he is an author/journalist in the industry and wrote 'All Your Base Are Belong To Us' https://shepherd.com/best-books/video-game-narrative-histori...

Re: Great books on classic video games

#64

I can recommend "I Am Error", Nathan Altice's book about the NES: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/i-am-error

I Am Error was excellent, as was Racing the Beam by Montfort and Bogost. That's from the same "platform studies" series as the Altice book, but focused on the technical and social development of the Atari 2600.
Post reply on HN