Fabien Sanglard

Sanglard tried two CalDigit docks three years apart, on both a MacBook Pro and a ThinkPad, plus a Thunderbolt 4 certification that explicitly mandates reliable wake-from-sleep. None of it worked. What finally fixed it was replacing the monitor, not the dock, and he still can't explain the mechanism.

In the thread, dozens of readers reported the identical bug across Anker, HP, Dell, OWC and Lenovo hardware — and one found a $20 used Lenovo dock, after a firmware update, more reliable than a $400 CalDigit.

The book covers the 80286, EGA hardware, the engine architecture and the CGA port, with source on GitHub and a free high-res PDF. The author calls it a return to debugging C and assembly as a teenager.

The context one reader added is the real lesson: dedicated console hardware rendered sprites for free, so a 'more powerful' PC had to invent tricks to fake what a SNES did in silicon. Several others noted the site looks a lot like Fabien Sanglard's.