Blog Posts on Lazy Stripes

Writing a game on pico-8

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:18:40 +0200

Back when we were Playing with Palettes, I justified the whole exercise with my desire to write a little more about old school game design. It turns out that, a while ago, I set out to write a game. A small but full game. From scratch.

On pico-8.

Color coded

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 12:08:47 +0100

Or “why did I spend a month writing a lexer to display words in pretty colors?”

Funny bugs: the missing byte

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 19:53:00 +0200

For literal years, there was a bug in my emulator that was just sneaky enough to kinda break a few games…

Funny bugs: the missing bit

Fri, 23 May 2025 15:30:42 +0200

How much difference a bit makes when forgetting it makes your ROM simply not work on proper emulators or original hardware.

Playing with Game Boy palettes

Tue, 20 May 2025 12:00:00 +0200

Writing an emulator is really cool, but what about writing ROMs for a Game Boy emulator? Come see how to program interesting effects using only a color palette. It’s okay, I used plenty of pictures, I promise!

Funny bugs: textures be hard

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 12:40:09 +0100

Directly writing data to a texture isn’t trivial, but it makes for interesting pictures when you get it wrong. Want to see a bunch of buggy screenshots?

This blog is now (mostly) static

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 14:50:12 +0200

I was tired of spending more time fighting WordPress than actually writing, so I got rid of it. Now, I no longer have any excuses for not writing more.

Click here to get a bigger logo!

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 16:41:50 +0200

Wow. Has it been two years already? Oh well… Anyway!

So hey, you remember how the Nintendo logo would scroll down when you turned on a Game Boy — and how writing enough of an emulator to see it was kind of the point of most of this blog?

Funny bugs: FIFO overrun

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 12:00:00 +0000

A quick article describing a funny bug, and a nerdy warning against premature optimization.

Writing an emulator: timing is key

Wed, 28 Jul 2021 12:00:00 +0200

We are so close! We now have scrolling pixels and sound. The pixels are scrolling a bit too fast and the sound is still kind of subpar. I won’t be trying to improve sound, but there should be something we can do about that speed issue.

Writing an emulator: sound will do

Thu, 17 Jun 2021 12:00:00 +0200

All right, it took a few extra months, but we’re finally getting somewhere. This article is hopefully the last one about sound. The result isn’t fantastic, but it works. And for the time being, that will do!

Writing an emulator: sound is still complicated

Tue, 26 Jan 2021 11:00:00 +0100

After a long hiatus, I went from outputting crappy sound to outputting crappy sound in stereo. Would you like to know more?

Goholint is going public!

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 11:00:00 +0100

The actual emulator I wrote and which prompted that series of articles on this very blog is finally functional enough that I decided to publish it on GitHub.

Writing an emulator: sound is complicated

Wed, 13 May 2020 12:00:00 +0200

Do you know how sound works? Well, me neither, but I hope we can figure it out together!

Writing an emulator: scrolling at last

Sun, 22 Dec 2019 11:00:00 +0100

A quick wrap-up of the last article, with bonus GIFs of the final result.

Writing an emulator: the first (real) pixel

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 12:00:00 +0200

Another article that took longer than I planned because of palettes, but that I tried softening with more pictures, and actual screenshots this time!

Writing an emulator: the first pixel

Sun, 15 Sep 2019 12:00:00 +0200

A much longer — though heavily illustrated — read built on top of the previous article’s code, in which we finally get to show tiles on a low-tech display.

Writing an emulator: memory management

Sun, 28 Jul 2019 12:00:00 +0200

Where I try using crude animations to distract you from the fact I’ve put a lot of effort into turning a program that crashes into one that just hangs.

Writing an emulator: the first steps

Tue, 09 Jul 2019 14:30:00 +0000

A promising start in which, after about 2000 words, I finally get to execute literally three bytes of machine code.

Writing an emulator: its all about the journey!

Sat, 06 Jul 2019 12:00:00 +0200

TL;DR: I started writing a Game Boy emulator in June 2018 and since then, at least three distinct people have expressed mild but polite interest in the details. I hope to show how it’s done, in mildly-to-heavily technical terms. It’s going to take a while but I hope it turns out marginally informative.

Hello world!

Tue, 25 Jun 2019 12:00:00 +0200

It’s been a while since I wrote anything and my usual platform isn’t really suitable anymore, so of course I have set up some overkill self-hosted solution to correct that.

A little therapeutic DIY

Mon, 23 Jun 2014 12:00:00 +0200

Summer isn’t my kind of season. I’m seldom at my best in summer. If anything, I’ve been particularly depressed when temperatures started steadily rising above 25°C, a few weeks ago.

MUSH log parser

Thu, 23 Jan 2014 12:00:00 +0200

Glimpses of an old Python parser for custom tags in MU* logfiles.

NaNoWriMo 2010, the first word count

Wed, 20 Nov 2013 12:00:00 +0200

I like the fact the NaNoWriMo website now stores statistics. It makes me realize how much more disciplined I’ve gotten over the years. But I was bothered by the fact I didn’t have the word count statistics for the very first year I did it.

What's wrong with this picture?

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:00:00 +0200

Honestly, what’s the worst, here?

Computer Archeology

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 12:00:00 +0200

How do you call something that’s been working so perfectly for the past ten years that nobody ever felt the need to touch it?

Obsolete!

…

Let me explain…