XtoF's Lair

This article presents the photographic capabilities of the iPhone 15 Pro and details its strong points in order to see if it is suitable for “serious” photography. A lot of sample pictures are displayed and can be downloaded in RAW format, so the reader can make his own opinion about...

AV1 is the codec preferred by Internet streaming services for serving videos. But not every SoC comes with a hardware decoder. What is the cost, in terms of power usage and battery consumption, of using an AV1 software decoder?

The 80386 is the most important CPU Intel ever produced. It confirmed the importance of the x86 line and sparked a computing revolution. And yet it almost never saw the light of day. This is the history of the 386 and why it was such a landmark.

This article compares the performance of a Macbook Pro running on an Apple Silicon M2 Pro against a PC Desktop running on an AMD Ryzen 3950X. Application tests are done using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, and a voluminous code base is compiled.

Windows 3 is often said to be just an UI on top of DOS. This article presents some of the inner side of Windows 3.x and will show that it is more ambitious and advanced than that.

When developing a homebrew for an old computer or console, it is important to regularly test it on the real machine. Why? Because emulators are often not 100% accurate and you can miss important bugs.

Techniques for timing on the IBM PC family under MS-DOS, and many related subjects. Sample functions and programs are included. This article is a repost of a piece by Kris Heidenstrom from the mid-90s.

A presentation of the 3D short movies I produced on PC more than twenty years ago, using 3D Studio on MS-DOS then 3DS Max on Windows NT. What was it like to model and raytrace during those early days? The videos can be watched in all their glory from the...

Amiga computers were renown for their graphical capacities. But they do not represent images in memory as modern computer do. Is it possible to load a modern image on an Amiga 500? This post explores some low-level aspects of Amiga graphics and present some conversion applications.

I just migrated this blog from WordPress to Jekyll. What are the advantages of Jekyll? The migration process is detailed, step by step. It is not as difficult as we could imagine.

pyArchiver is a script dedicated to archiving huge volume of data into cold storage. But what is cold storage? How is an archive different from a backup?

An efficient random level generator running on the Apple II, with a modest 1MHz 6502 CPU, requires to carefully choose the algorithms and some programming tricks. This post details every step.