Kyle Halladay
kylehalladay.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2017
Kyle Halladay, a game programmer, writes about graphics hacks, DirectX hooking, Vulkan and Game Boy Advance development.
What HN saysHN commenters link his Notepad rendering posts to explain how the demos work, and his post on a game-dev hack that exploited a EULA.
16HN people shared it
8linked it in comments
19stories submitted
1.6Kstory points
7 months agolast shared
2017people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Ray tracing in notepad.exe at 30 FPS9 people · 1.1K points · first shared 2020 · 101 comments on HN
- 2Recreating an Old “Dirty Gamedev Trick” (2019)4 people · 88 points · first shared 2019 · 36 comments on HN
- 3Hooking keyboard input to play Snake in Notepad.exe (2020)2 people · 90 points · first shared 2020 · 16 comments on HN
- 4Hooking and Hijacking DirectX 11 Functions in Skyrim2 people · 3 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 5Gameboy Advance development by example: Drawing and Moving Rectangles1 people · 149 points · first shared 2017 · 66 comments on HN
- 6Gameboy Advance Development by Example: Drawing and Moving Sprites1 people · 136 points · first shared 2017 · 21 comments on HN
- 7GBA by Example: Drawing and Moving Backgrounds1 people · 4 points · first shared 2017 · 2 comments on HN
- 8Comparing Uniform Data Transfer Methods in Vulkan1 people · 3 points · first shared 2017 · 1 comments on HN
- 9Gameboy Advance Development by Example: Sprite Animations1 people · 3 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 10I Wrote a Book About Shaders1 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 11GBA by Example – Getting User Input1 people · 2 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 12X64 Function Hooking by Example1 people · 2 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 13Writing a Simple Vulkan Memory Allocator1 people · 1 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 14Archive1 people · first shared 2021
What HN people wrote when they linked it
pierrec · 2026-04-08
The parts where it exits fullscreen and starts messing around with separate windows is really well done. In a way it's playing with the limits of what defines a demo (ie. the user's desktop is part of the performance), which is something I love to see. Same with the notepad animation part. I wonder if they implemented their own notepad-alike from scratch or it they used something like this: https://kylehalladay.com/blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Notepad.html
rishabhd · 2026-01-04
Amazing story. Here is one of my favorite ones as well, when Naughty Dog intentionally exploited EULA to fix Ratchet and Clank.
https://kylehalladay.com/blog/2019/12/04/Recreating-A-Dirty-Gamedev-Ha…
AndrewDucker · 2022-10-10
Almost certainly writing direct to memory, as per http://kylehalladay.com/blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Notepad.html
jchw · 2022-06-10
As far as I know, most of this stuff still works. There might be some security boundaries that apps can opt into, but most of them do not. So something running as your user, you can probably manipulate the UI of.
There's been some amusing ones even not so long ago, like this one:
http://kylehalladay.com/blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Notepad.html
edit: Bad example, they are using WriteProcessMemory. Still a lot of fun, but not the same. I was thinking of this:
https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/1263190719721766918
scintill76 · 2021-04-20
Won't somebody please think of backcompat with the Notepad raytracer?![1]
[1] http://kylehalladay.com/blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Notepad.html
chmod775 · 2021-03-27
> The first thing that jumped out at me in this story was the part about sending machine code over the network to be executed by the game. It had never occurred to me that this was possible, despite it being obvious in hindsight.
This is a good reminder that us software devs generally live in bubbles, not really thinking about or (sometimes intentionally) ignoring things that are not immediately relevant to our work.
The author appears to mostly work in game development, specifically shading, 3D, and engine development. Generally you think very little about writing secure code in those fields.
You can actually see him going down the "low-level rabbit-hole" if have a look at his posts: http://kylehalladay.com/archive.html
tyingq · 2020-05-28
Related, and recently discussed here[1], a ray tracer that uses Notepad for its UI: http://kylehalladay.com/blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Notepad.html
Though the ray tracer used a more complicated, and more efficient way of manipulating the Notepad "framebuffer".
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246221