2025-02-12 John Tsiombikas' personal web site

SNES hacking notes - A collection of notes I'm keeping as I'm experimenting with hacking on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. 7 July 2020 - ?

Bare Metal PC Hacking - A series of short posts about low level PC hacking. About writing code that boots and runs on the bare machine, without the help of an operating system. ~ 19 April 2018 - ?

SEGA Mega Drive PAL/NTSC switching - how to modify a SEGA Megadrive (Genesis) to switch between PAL and NTSC modes with a toggle switch. ~ 22 March 2017

Practical Makefiles, by example - A short tutorial on how to write practical makefiles for your projects. ~ 9 February 2015

Color Space Linearity and Gamma Correction - an article explaining the issue of linear vs non-linear (sRGB) color space, and how to correctly perform lighting calculations in a linear color space with OpenGL. ~ 26 October 2012

Kernel programming from scratch - an ongoing series of articles for the linux inside magazine about writing a rudimentary operating system kernel from scratch. Currently in greek only. ~ 1 March 2011 - 1 January 2012

Fast & easy fractals with a pixel shader - A tutorial on calculating the mandelbrot and julia fractals directly on the GPU with the OpenGL shading language. ~ 6 February 2006

Preparing for GBA development - A small article guiding you through the process of setting up the necessary tools for GameBoy Advance development. ~ 29 January 2006

Pointers explained - A clean and concise explanation of pointers in C and C++ for beginners, who often have trouble understanding how to use them. ~ 18 July 2004

Shadow volumes tutorial - Tutorial on the shadow volume (stencil shadows) algorithm. ~ 22 May 2003

3D graphics programming series - Unfinished series about 3D graphics algorithms. Only the first issue was ever completed, about 3D math.  ~ 27 August 2002

Introduction to Direct Draw (in greek) - Continuing from the previous Win32 tutorial, this article describes how to use the Direct Draw 7 API for fast access to the framebuffer.  ~ 8 August 2001

The Basics of Win32 Programming (in greek). ~ 8 June 2001

Huffman Compression (in greek) - Description of the Huffman compression algorithm. ~ 6 April 2001