The Curious Engineer

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Scali's OpenBlog™

scalibq.wordpress.com

Programming, graphics, hardware, maths, and that sort of thing

GraphicsDOS / vintage PCDemosceneCPU / microarchitecture

’10’15’20’25
Posts
332 from 27 Jan 2009 to 9 Oct 2026
Posting
now and then (3 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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2026 2

  1. Windows 11 26H2: not for everyone?
  2. Analog that isn’t analog

2025 3

  1. IBM’s dark AT secrets
  2. On rendering and solved problems
  3. Another adventure in downgrading, part 5: Linux

2024 8

  1. Windows 11 24H2: not for everyone
  2. Troy Grady appreciation post
  3. How to build your own CEF with MP4 support
  4. CEF developers…
  5. .NET Core: the small print
  6. Lemmings, or how clever tricks make platforms more different than they seem
  7. Some results from the modified XDC movie player for 8088/CGA
  8. Video playback (with audio) on low-end MS-DOS machines

2023 9

  1. Bothsidesism…
  2. A small update on downgrading
  3. Implementing live video streaming in software
  4. MartyPC: PC emulation done right
  5. Cartridges for the IBM PC
  6. Another adventure in downgrading, part 4: Fixed function
  7. The DOS SDK
  8. A great upgrade for the PCjr: the jr-IDE
  9. When is a PC not a PC? The PC-98

2022 20

  1. A new MPU-401 solution: The Music Quest clone
  2. A new game for DOS/EGA/AdLib: Super Space Fuel Inc.
  3. Windows 7: the end is nigh
  4. The myth of the vertical retrace interrupt
  5. Managers in software
  6. Why AMD should never have made x86 processors in the first place
  7. More donut madness
  8. Isn’t it great when things just… work?
  9. Yet more thoughts!
  10. Another adventure in downgrading, part 3: XP
  11. Another adventure in downgrading, part 2: Vista
  12. Another adventure in downgrading: .NET 4.8 to .NET 4.6.2
  13. VGA and MCGA, what’s the difference?
  14. Area 5150, a reflection
  15. Area 5150: 8088 MPH gets a successor
  16. GPU-accelerated video decoding
  17. Video codecs and 4k
  18. Retro programming, what is it?
  19. An Amiga can’t do Wolfenstein 3D!
  20. Do 8-bit DACs result in 8-bit audio quality?

2021 1

  1. Migrating to .NET Core: the future of .NET.

2020 9

  1. Running anything Remedy/Futuremark/MadOnion/UL in 2020
  2. The Trumpians love their children too
  3. The Cult of Wokeness, followup
  4. The Cult of Wokeness
  5. The strong ARM
  6. Batch, batch, batch: Respect the classics!
  7. Politicians vs entrepreneurs
  8. Some thoughts on emulators
  9. Windows and ARM: not over yet

2019 11

  1. Bitbucket ends support for Mercurial (Hg), a quick guide
  2. Am I a software architect?
  3. Who is a software architect? What is software architecture?
  4. AMD Bulldozer: It’s time to settle
  5. Steinberger guitars and basses: less is more
  6. Zen2: Credit where credit’s due
  7. Just keeping it real at Revision 2019
  8. The IBM Music Feature Card and Yamaha FB-01
  9. The DreamBlaster S2P: General MIDI from a parallel port
  10. Keeping it real for Outline 2018
  11. An emulator that 8088 MPH doesn’t break?

2018 10

  1. Read any good books lately?
  2. Intel tries its hand at a discrete GPU again?
  3. The “Visual Basic Effect”
  4. What is software development? An art? Craft? Trade? Occupation?… Part 3
  5. Bugs you can’t fix
  6. What is software development? An art? Craft? Trade? Occupation?… Part 2
  7. Putting the things together, part 2: MIDI and other problems
  8. What is software development? An art? Craft? Trade? Occupation?… Part 1
  9. What makes the PCjr cool, and what makes it uncool?
  10. More PC(jr) incompatibilities!

2017 12

  1. The Covox years
  2. Scali on Agile Development
  3. Experience and skill in software development
  4. Software: How to parallel?
  5. nVidia makes good on their promise: DX12 support for Fermi
  6. The Pessimist Pamphlet
  7. Trackers vs MIDI, part deux
  8. Trackers vs MIDI
  9. DMA activation
  10. A picture says more than a thousand words
  11. Putting the things together
  12. Programming: What separates the men from the boys?

2016 17

  1. Any real-keeping lately?
  2. AMD Zen: a bit of a deja-vu?
  3. DirectX 12 and Vulkan: what it is, and what it isn’t
  4. FutureMark’s Time Spy: some people still don’t get it
  5. GeForce GTX1060: nVidia brings Pascal to the masses
  6. AMD’s Polaris debuts in Radeon RX480: I told you so
  7. GameWorks vs GPUOpen: closed vs open does not work the way you think it does
  8. The damage that AMD marketing does
  9. Commander Keen 4: now in 16-colour composite CGA!
  10. Thought: Neutral and objective versus politically correct.
  11. nVidia’s GeForce GTX 1080, and the enigma that is DirectX 12
  12. That’s not Possible on this Platform!
  13. Rise of the Tomb Raider: DX12 update
  14. Pseudoscience: DNA activation
  15. Pseudoscience: Kangen Water
  16. The philosophy of science
  17. The myth of HBM

2015 14

  1. PC-compatibility, it’s all relative
  2. BHM File Format release 0.3b
  3. Latch onto this, it’s all relative
  4. DirectX 12 is out, let’s review
  5. Fixing Genesis Project’s GP-01
  6. nVidia does support D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_12_0
  7. 8088 MPH: The final version
  8. No DX12_1 for upcoming Radeon 3xx and Fury series?
  9. Food for thought
  10. 8088 MPH: The polygons
  11. 8088 MPH: Sprites? Where we’re going, we don’t need… sprites!
  12. 8088 MPH: How it came about
  13. Just keeping it real at Revision 2015
  14. Triton’s Crystal Dream – the final chapter

2014 17

  1. Test Drive’s pixelized transition effect
  2. CGADEMO by Codeblasters
  3. No love for some OSes?
  4. Direct3D 11.3 (and nVidia’s Maxwell Mark 2)
  5. Intel disables TSX in Haswell
  6. 1991 donut – final release
  7. 8088 Domination by Trixter/Hornet
  8. When old and new meet: lessons from the past
  9. More hate fail…
  10. Richard Huddy back at AMD, talks more Mantle…
  11. Just keeping it real… bugfixing like it’s 1991
  12. AMD fanboys posing as developers
  13. Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal
  14. Who was first, DirectX 12 or Mantle? nVidia or AMD?
  15. DirectX 12: A first quick look
  16. GnuTLS: Just because people can read the source, doesn’t mean that they do
  17. Independent Mantle benchmarks start to trickle in

2013 28

  1. Windows 8 doesn’t detect my sound card!
  2. nVidia stability issues on GeForce 400/500 series
  3. Just keeping it real… like it’s 1991
  4. SteamOS and Mantle
  5. Alex St. John: The Evolution of Direct3D
  6. Funny search terms
  7. Hand of Thief: commercial linux malware kit
  8. Speak of the devil… Ubuntu forums hacked
  9. Linux, the Dunning-Kruger OS
  10. Cubemaps
  11. The problem with free/open source software
  12. AMD Richland, another improvement that is not an improvement
  13. Haswell Hasarrived
  14. The myth of linux/open source security
  15. Just keeping it Metro
  16. Revision 2013 is keeping it real
  17. Latency and stuttering with 3D acceleration
  18. Just keeping it real, part 10.1
  19. Just keeping it real, part 10
  20. Just keeping it real, part 9
  21. Just keeping it real, part 8
  22. Assemblers are not compilers!
  23. What is a platform anyway?
  24. OS and platform wars, why even bother anymore?
  25. Just keeping it real, part 7
  26. The fading boundaries of internet communication
  27. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing
  28. Chiptunes…

2012 50

  1. x86 vs ARM: Intel’s next move is Clover Trail
  2. Just keeping it real, part 6
  3. Visual Studio versioning and compatibility
  4. Direct3D versioning and compatibility
  5. The return of Larrabee, and Kepler’s true form
  6. Commodore 64: 30 years of keeping it real
  7. Intel Haswell: How low can you go?
  8. AMD Steamroller
  9. More thoughts…
  10. Random thoughts on programming, culture and such
  11. A brief overview on the history of 3D graphics hardware
  12. Another FreeBSD server upgrade…
  13. sykozis does not believe I own this blog
  14. John Fruehe leaves AMD
  15. Apple’s OS X is NOT linux!
  16. Valve to bring Steam and Left 4 Dead 2 to linux
  17. Be aware of the world around you
  18. First Fedora, now Canonical
  19. Voice of reason, quite…
  20. Linux and UEFI secure boot, or: Linus Torvalds as the voice of reason
  21. Remember caveman-jim?
  22. Never program in your native language!
  23. Multi-core and multi-threading performance (the multi-core myth?)
  24. The story of multi-monitor rendering
  25. The Windows command prompt is *NOT* a DOS prompt!
  26. AMD introduces Trinity: When is an improvement not an improvement?
  27. Richard Huddy responds again
  28. Richard Huddy comments on my blog
  29. Windows XP: The gold standard of Windows OSes?
  30. The story of microsleep, followup
  31. The story of microsleep
  32. nVidia’s new GeForce GTX680: You win some, you lose some?
  33. Triton’s Crystal Dream restored and preserved for posterity
  34. My most ‘DailyWTF’ moment?
  35. Oldskool demo fixing
  36. Scali’s guide to joyful programming
  37. Ivy Bridge: Intel goes 22 nm and DirectX 11
  38. Legacy Catalyst driver problems with OpenGL, AMD replies
  39. Legacy Catalyst driver problems with OpenGL
  40. Windows 8 and Visual Studio 11 go public beta
  41. Optimizing in higher programming languages
  42. CPUs and pipelines, how do they work?
  43. The myth of CMT (Cluster-based Multithreading)
  44. A tutorial on programming C
  45. Porting BHM3DSample to Android: Some… well… a lot of… stressful development
  46. Another root exploit for linux
  47. Intel Medfield vs ARM
  48. Why I don’t use linux (and why you shouldn’t either)
  49. Just keeping it real, part 5.1
  50. nVidia’s shader use for tessellation is NOT, I repeat NOT different from AMD’s

2011 50

  1. Just keeping it real, part 5
  2. AMD and tessellation: A difficult relationship
  3. AMD Radeon 7970: Graphics Core Next debuts
  4. Just keeping it real, part 4.6
  5. Just keeping it real, part 4.5
  6. Just keeping it real, part 4
  7. Just keeping it real, part 3
  8. Just keeping it real, part 2
  9. Just keeping it real… old skool style
  10. Why technical forum discussions don’t work
  11. Meet AMD’s Mike Houston
  12. AMD Bulldozer, can it get even worse?
  13. John Fruehe finally does the sensible thing and comes up with an excuse
  14. AMD admits mistake in new blog
  15. AMD Bulldozer: Nothing to see here, moving on
  16. Intel Lynnfield memory woes
  17. First kernel.org, now mysql.com hacked
  18. Some Bulldozer FX performance indication from AMD themselves
  19. What people like caveman-jim still don’t get about tessellation…
  20. AMD Bulldozer Zambezi FX-8100 benchmarks from SiSoftware
  21. Phoronix: FreeBSD: A Faster Platform For Linux Gaming Than Linux?
  22. Porting BHM3DSample to iPhone: some Objective-C++ and OpenGL ES development
  23. The kernel.org hack
  24. 20 years of linux
  25. Hate fail
  26. Crysis 2 tessellation…
  27. A fix if Mirror’s Edge hangs at the splash screen
  28. Yes, AMD fanboys *are* idiots
  29. AMD agrees: John Fruehe is a liar
  30. Premature Design is the root of all evil
  31. BHM skinning sample running on OS X
  32. BHM file format and GLUX projects updated
  33. Source code is NOT documentation
  34. Why do people think that using linux makes them an expert?
  35. OS X–Safer by design?
  36. AMD follows nVidia’s lead in GPU design
  37. AMD leaves BAPco
  38. Intel Larrabee is back!
  39. Microsoft: “WebGL considered harmful”
  40. AMD releases Fusion A8 series, codename Llano
  41. Oh dear, Intel!
  42. What is happening to PC games?
  43. Richard Huddy talks nonsense again
  44. Time for another engine update
  45. RISC vs CISC, round #213898234
  46. Are you shy, Ruckus?
  47. 3D Engine, it’s been a while…
  48. Catalyst Hotfix 11.1a: AMD admits defeat in tessellation
  49. Come on, don’t be shy!
  50. It’s official now: Windows on ARM

2010 35

  1. Windows 7 on ARM?
  2. AMD Radeon 6900 series: Much ado about nothing…
  3. Found another nice old Beyond3D failure
  4. AMD tries to do more damage-control for tessellation
  5. Running nVidia’s Endless City tessellation demo on Radeons
  6. Linux patch improves desktop performance
  7. AMD shows the first Fusion APU
  8. Proof of what I said in my previous blog, from an unexpected place
  9. AMD/Richard Huddy need to lie about tessellation
  10. Linux, Unix, BSD, what does it all mean? And where does Windows fit in?
  11. PhysX followup: a few days later…
  12. PhysX: An easy target?
  13. John Fruehe: AMD’s latest and greatest liar
  14. Beyond3D’s reality distortion field
  15. So I got my Gigabyte GeForce GTX460OC 1 GB card
  16. GeForce GTX460: the Fermi for me
  17. The Russians are coming!
  18. A mind is a terrible thing to waste
  19. The moment many of you have been waiting for: it’s the nVidia fanboys’ turn!
  20. Sony’s PlayStation 3’s main graphics API is *NOT* OpenGL!
  21. Steam hits the Mac
  22. Thoughts of a Direct3D developer after a few months of OpenGL development
  23. The BHM 3D vertex skinning sample
  24. A progress update on the BHM project
  25. Some more 3D engine-related news
  26. Why you should use OpenGL and not DirectX – an analysis
  27. Fermi is here!
  28. Well, speak of the devil…
  29. OpenGL vs Direct3D, round #231489324
  30. Bohemiq demos now finally available on Youtube
  31. Intel Graphics FTW!
  32. Direct3D11 downlevel functionality, how very nice
  33. So, whatever happened to that 3D engine of yours?
  34. nVidia shows the other side of Fermi
  35. Intel Compiler soap, another episode of AMD fanboy idiocy

2009 36

  1. Random thoughts and updates
  2. A matter of self-vindication?
  3. Got my Radeon 5770
  4. New CPUInfo release: 0.4a
  5. Disaster struck…
  6. Helping end-users with DLL dependency problems
  7. Batman Arkham Asylum: A battle of wits between nVidia and AMD
  8. Another quick update on the OpenCL situation
  9. The big FreeBSD server upgrade
  10. Thank you for proving my point
  11. Would there be a lot less rumours if people bothered to think?
  12. DirectX 11, now also for Vista users!
  13. Are all AMD fans idiots?
  14. BHM, a new open source file format
  15. When you reach the point you always wanted to be
  16. CPUInfo goes multi-platform
  17. Rattling the OpenCL cages seems to have paid off
  18. CPUInfo, an open source multiplatform library for determining CPU features
  19. AMD’s AND nVidia’s OpenCL suck on even more levels than I thought
  20. AMD seriously needs to work on their PR
  21. nVidia gives an answer to AMD
  22. AMD put its DirectX 11 cards on the table
  23. Tomorrow AMD and nVidia enter the DirectX 11 ring
  24. Are all linux users idiots?
  25. My theory on hi-gain distortion and muddy sounds
  26. What’s with guitarists and their obsession of ‘tone’?
  27. Cult of Personality 2.0
  28. And another progress update…
  29. More progress…
  30. A progress update on the D3D engine
  31. Getting back to business
  32. Repairing stuff…
  33. Following up…
  34. About those ‘tech-savvy’ people again
  35. Windows 7, an amazing feat
  36. The ever humble Danny Danzi