Look at the pixel art! It's insane they got it looking this good on a Commodore 64, the same platform that Maniac Mansion was made on.

Let there be light. Background color is broken, but at least light is correct now. This is a more precise model compared to the original game (per vertex instead of per face, and interpolated depth instead of just 32 possible intensities). Can toggle the old Saturn computation at runtime.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlMN... The footage is. a bit dated, lots of fixes and improvements since this was recorded @videogameesoterica.bsky.social Some comments bellow. #decomp #panzerdragoonsaga #panzerdragoon

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlMN... The footage is. a bit dated, lots of fixes and improvements since this was recorded @videogameesoterica.bsky.social Some comments bellow. #decomp #panzerdragoonsaga #panzerdragoon

@nfalstein.bsky.social trip down memory lane!

I've been focusing on town module lately, trying to get most locations in place. The seeker stronghold & caravan now load, but they are mostly empty without any NPC for now. github.com/yaz0r/Azel #decomp #panzerdragoonsaga

Trivia night!

Lego announced a Tintin Moon Rocket set. There goes my wallet... #tintin #lego www.lego.com/en-us/produc...

Always love to see lost media resurface

Quite a bit of work on VDP2 lately, implemented the perspective planes, sky, and the weird fish eye effect. I always wondered how that worked. Turns out it's a per-pixel offset table covering the top half of the screen. Bottom is just reading the table in reverse. #panzerdragoonsaga #decompilation

Gpu crash is always such a pain to debug. Hopefully that will help

This weekend, implemented the bulk of the baldor queen fight. As usual, bunch of hardcoded state machines, and for the first time, what looks like struct inheritance that I had to work around. Also implemented animated particle effects. #panzerdragoonsaga #decomp

@esper.bsky.social listening the even more games of the year 2025 while I'm working on something, and you sold me on Squeakross

Dusted off the ghidra database, made the first actual code commit to Panzer Dragoon Saga decomp in 5y

Revisiting a codebase I haven’t touched in 5 years…

A thread regarding the Panzer Dragoon Saga decompilation thing. github.com/yaz0r/Azel #decompilation #decomp #recomp

@damienmcferran.bsky.social @videogameesoterica.bsky.social happy to give more context on the Panzer Dragoon Saga decomp thing.

www.timeextension.com/news/2026/02... Funny how this thing picked up online recently

Floppy disk surgery

Over the past week, I've learned way too much about late 70s computers, CP/M and the various 5.25' floppy formats (hard sectored for the North Star Horizon). I'm ready for trivia night. #vintagecomputing #retrocomputer

Oh boy, yeah that was IRC I think

I had to read the theadline a couple times. A vulkan extension to improve directX on linux kinda required to mental gymnastics to parse. It does make sense in the context of dxvk and all, but it does sound weird at face value

hey guys, just to confirm this is my fundraiser. i didn't want to ask for help, but i do need it. my cancer is back. i am going through a lobectomy next week, the same surgery Walter White undergoes. i can't express how grateful i am. thank you so much everyone. www.gofundme.com/f/support-ge...

State of the art game dev tools in 1989: #gamedev (source: mastodon.social/@grumpygamer...)

Restored the attract sequence of the Police Academy prototype

Published RadViewer to visualize the old RAD files from Atari/Tengen github.com/yaz0r/RadVie... It's been pretty annoying to look at old RAD files through Dosbox, so made a modern viewer for windows. For more context about RAD files: www.museumofplay.org/blog/thats-r...

What fascinates me in that stuff is the glimpse we get into how game development worked in the early 90s. For example, they didn't really generate fully formed roms, but just loaded all the compiled bits in a dev cartridge. If they needed a rom back, they would just read that back.

Folks at @gamehistoryorg.bsky.social received a hard-drive image of a VAX machine. Sadly, the disk had been mostly wiped and only showed up an empty folder. I went back to the 70s VAX filesystem specs and wrote a tool to reassemble as much as possible of the files. We got some cool roms out of it.

Spent some fun time the last few weeks getting some old NES source code of Police Academy back into a compliable state. Fun dive into the the early 90s development system and all that stuff. Code and instructions on how to build it I wrote are released today by @gamehistoryorg.bsky.social

Reminder: I'm dumping mystery prototypes live this Wednesday! Here's a teaser, real ones will see something exciting. www.youtube.com/live/RJwR8jX...

Some fun results of the data recovery I’ve been poking around recently. Given how mangled the disk was, we’re lucky to have something like that come out of it

Mission accomplished at the last minute!

My goal for the break is to finish Persona 3 Reloaded DLC. I'm close to the end (I think), but I probably need to grind quite a bit more... :(

If you have GDC Vault access, you can check out my 2024 talk about how we built quests for #DIabloIV. I'm quite proud of how this talk came together. I tried to make sure it was packed with actionable info if you're interested in #NarrativeDesign or #MissionDesign! gdcvault.com/play/1034226...

I’m hoping we have a tight enough scene that if someone spots this stuff for sale we can catch these shitheads

Pluribus is an interesting premise. I would have so many questions if I was in her shoes.

It’s a coffee by the bay kind of day

Hi friends, I'm still looking for freelance & contract work! I'd love to help contribute to bringing your worlds and stories to life!

As an french expat, this still triggers me. This is not a croissant. 🥐

"Return of the Obra Dinn" is seven years old this week. For this not-particularly-special anniversary, here's a re-cammed and narrated timelapse of (nearly) all character creation, object modeling, scene posing, and general 3D work for Obra Dinn from 2015 to 2018: youtu.be/90vqCKEEj3s

Haven't been posting much here. Mostly heads down working on pet projects and reading about interesting tech. Been digging into stuff like mesh shaders recently and how to leverage them on modern GPUs. I find it pretty interesting stuff and itching to write some code using them.

Haven’t had a landline in more than a decade, but would totally want a pacman phone.

Back in the bay after a week working from London. Mostly dodged the jetlag.

A very nice movie. Hope the Japanese public give it a chance

Mystery explained

Finally! Saved post!

Little bonus fact about that one. The game actually expects keyboard inputs on the 2nd controller port. The basic controls work with just a game controller, but the code checks for keyboard events for some of the more advanced stuff, especially the in-battle debug menu.

Panzer Dragoon Saga tech fact: The game shipped with a bunch of debug menus/features At boot up, if the game detect a save with a special name, debug modes will be enabled. More debug flags are enabled if a button on 2nd controller is pressed when hitting start. 👇 www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC2L...

Panzer Dragoon Saga tech fact: The boot-up sequence is a bit non-standard for a Saturn game Normally, a Saturn game boots but first loading a sega provided file (IP.BIN) embedded at a very specific sector of the game disk. This in turn is responsible for loading the game exe. 👇 #panzerdragoonsaga