Top all-time · #4402
Kyle Halladay
Personal blog · kylehalladay.com/blogprogramminggames
Kyle Halladay's personal blog at kylehalladay.com covers programming and games. Since 2017, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times, most often “Ray tracing in notepad.exe at 30 FPS”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Kyle Halladay's blog for hacks on Windows programs, such as a ray tracer and game rendered through Notepad's window, and game-dev stories like Ratchet and Clank's machine code trick.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
I build shaders, renderers, games, and other stuff that's fun to stare at.
Most-linked posts?
- Ray tracing in notepad.exe at 30 FPS7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-05-20
- Recreating an Old “Dirty Gamedev Trick” (2019)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-12-04
- Hooking keyboard input to play Snake in Notepad.exe (2020)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-05-20
- Ray Tracing in Notepad.exe at 30 FPS (2020)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-12-23
- Hooking and Hijacking DirectX 11 Functions in Skyrim2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-07-12
What Hacker News says?
As far as I know, most of this stuff still works. There might be some security boundaries that apps can opt into, but most of them do not. So something running as your user, you can probably manipulate the UI of. There's been some amusing ones even not so long ago, like this one: http://kylehalladay.com/blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Notep... edit: Bad example, they are using WriteProcessMemory. Still a lot of fun,…
Comment linking /blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Notepad.html
on “Show HN: My small program from 2007 that gave Internet Explorer tabs”Submitted Ray tracing in notepad.exe at 30 FPS as a story · 747 points
HN discussion:) http://kylehalladay.com/blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Notep...
Comment linking /blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Notepad.html
on “Redesigned Notepad for Windows 11”Submitted Ray Tracing in Notepad.exe at 30 FPS (2020) as a story · 339 points
HN discussionWon't somebody please think of backcompat with the Notepad raytracer?![1] [1] http://kylehalladay.com/blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Notep...
Comment linking /blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Notepad.html
on “Bug in Notepad Involving Asterisk in Title Bar”Submitted Gameboy Advance development by example: Drawing and Moving Rectangles as a story · 149 points
HN discussionRelated, and recently discussed here[1], a ray tracer that uses Notepad for its UI: http://kylehalladay.com/blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Notep... Though the ray tracer used a more complicated, and more efficient way of manipulating the Notepad "framebuffer". [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246221
Comment linking /blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Notepad.html
on “How I made a game played in Notepad”Submitted Gameboy Advance Development by Example: Drawing and Moving Sprites as a story · 136 points
HN discussion> The first thing that jumped out at me in this story was the part about sending machine code over the network to be executed by the game. It had never occurred to me that this was possible, despite it being obvious in hindsight. This is a good reminder that us software devs generally live in bubbles, not really thinking about or (sometimes intentionally) ignoring things that are not immediately relevant to our work…
Comment linking /archive.html
on “Recreating an Old “Dirty Gamedev Trick” (2019)”Submitted Hooking keyboard input to play Snake in Notepad.exe (2020) as a story · 88 points
HN discussionAlmost certainly writing direct to memory, as per http://kylehalladay.com/blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Notep...
Comment linking /blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Notepad.html
on “Someone Got Doom Running in Notepad at 60 FPS, Somehow”Submitted Recreating an Old “Dirty Gamedev Trick” (2019) as a story · 82 points
HN discussionAmazing story. Here is one of my favorite ones as well, when Naughty Dog intentionally exploited EULA to fix Ratchet and Clank. https://kylehalladay.com/blog/2019/12/04/Recreating-A-Dirty-...
Comment linking /blog/2019/12/04/Recreating-A-Dirty-Gamedev-Hack.html
on “Street Fighter II, the World Warrier (2021)”Submitted Recreating an Old “Dirty Gamedev Trick” as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThe parts where it exits fullscreen and starts messing around with separate windows is really well done. In a way it's playing with the limits of what defines a demo (ie. the user's desktop is part of the performance), which is something I love to see. Same with the notepad animation part. I wonder if they implemented their own notepad-alike from scratch or it they used something like this: https://kylehalladay.com/…
Comment linking /blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Notepad.html
on “Razor1911. A demo 40 years in the making”Submitted GBA by Example: Drawing and Moving Backgrounds as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Comparing Uniform Data Transfer Methods in Vulkan as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Gameboy Advance Development by Example: Sprite Animations as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Ray Tracing in Notepad.exe at 30 FPS (2020) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Hooking and Hijacking DirectX 11 Functions in Skyrim as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted X64 Function Hooking by Example as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Hooking Keyboard Input to Play Snake in Notepad.exe as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted I Wrote a Book About Shaders as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted GBA by Example – Getting User Input as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Hooking and Hijacking DirectX 11 Functions in Skyrim as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Recreating an Old “Dirty Gamedev Trick” as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Writing a Simple Vulkan Memory Allocator as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
