‘Code’ Category Archive


September 2, 2019

Family BASIC in 2019

In preparation for an article I'm writing on hobbyist Japanese Famicom programmers in the 80s, I've spent the past few days diving into a quirky ...

Read More


June 8, 2015

I AM EXTRA: Manic Compression

How Donkey Kong's programmers used compression to save ROM space. The following section is one of I AM ERROR’s oldest—it appeared in the initial drafts of ...

Read More


December 10, 2014

Unforeseeable Sentences

Last month, professor and media theorist Jay Bolter wrote a short post called 'Browsing culture' that rebuts a refrain commonly heard from fans of ...

Read More


December 13, 2012

10 PRINT NES

Porting randomness The 10 PRINT book is now available for purchase and download. Its full title is a single line of BASIC code, written for ...

Read More


April 6, 2012

Interview: Paul Robson, programmer of the NESA emulator

The first Famicom/NES emulators began to appear around 1996. By most accounts, PasoFamicom, developed by Nobuaki Andou, was the first. Unfortunately, it wasn't user-friendly ...

Read More


March 24, 2012

Porting the Kill Screen

Dissecting the code behind an error The 2007 film King of Kong popularized much of the minutia of high-level arcade play. One scene showed underdog ...

Read More