foone

foone, 4 months ago to random

wait a fucking second...

it has been ZERO DAYS since I found an off-by-one error in a game from 1990

foone, 8 months ago to random

the best thing about ghidra is that no matter which version you're using, setting equates sometimes just doesn't work, but if you google it, you only find several bug reports which basically say "equates don't work" and then it's "closed, fixed in X.Y.Z" and that's a version you're upgraded way past

foone, 10 months ago to random

I love finding a function in a game that is literally just
void func(const char*){
}

No body. But it's called from 440 different places in the exe.

you can just smell the #IFDEF DEBUGMODE in the binary

foone, 8 months ago to random

hmm. I need to either start building documentation about which of my 13 current Ghidra installs have which extensions installed, or I need to set up a ghidra build environment and commit to maintaining a One True Ghidra environment with all the extensions

foone, 10 months ago to random

ugh, projects:

• Wheel of Fortune (2010, Wii): I need to get way smarter or rewrite Dolphin. Neither is likely to happen anytime soon
• Barbie Fashion Show: I need to write a tool to inject textures, not just extract them. This should be easy if I don't change image sizes
• Take No Prisoners: I'm not really sure where I am with this one/what's left. I can maybe dump opcodes of the scripting system with a bit more work?

foone, 8 months ago to random

wow, this is not a problem I run into that often: the game I want to reverse engineer is, in fact, easy to dig into, with lots of easily decompiled classes!

except I can't read any of them, because they're named in Finnish.

class HuoneenNroPaivitysScripti
class KakkosTalonTapahtumat
class MrspookKontrlScript

foone, 2 months ago to random

I finally lugged my Highscreen SkyTower AT tower up to my office. This machine is beautiful, even when it's yellowed and dusty and grimy and rusty.

foone, 9 months ago to random

what?

Return of the Obra Dinn saves your game as .txt files
containing XML
which contain a date and a <data> element that's a base64 encoded string.

foone, 6 months ago to random

So I ran memtest86+ on my desktop.
It didn't error!
or succeed. It just... hung, 25 minutes in.

that's probably not a good sign

foone, 9 months ago to random

So apparently the answer to "How long does VGAPride take to compile on a 386 with 2mb of RAM?" is "GENERAL PROTECTION FAULT AT 09C7:0804"

foone, 9 months ago to random

wow the autodesk fusion 360 API docs are interesting. it seems like they're trying to see how much documentation they can write without possibly being useful

foone, 9 months ago to random

Weird that no one seems to have implemented the TOTP algorithm in C.

How am I supposed to port it to DOS without a C implementation?

foone, 10 months ago to random

I like how quickly a non-project can spiral out of hand. I have a Packard Bell 386 here with a dying hard drive. So I get my roommate to buy me an IDE drive, but it turns out it's also dying and I have to back up a bunch of files off it. so I get a CF to IDE adapter, but then it turns out it needs a 3.5" floppy power adapter, and I don't have one on hand. so I build a cable, then it turns out I can't easily mount the CF card in the hard drive slot, because it's bottom-mounted, not side-mounted

foone, 7 months ago to random

when you're installing a mouse driver into your DOS installation, do you do the lazy thing and stick MOUSE.EXE/CTMOUSE.EXE into C:\DOS? or do you keep things "clean" by putting it in C:\MOUSE and adjusting the PATH?

foone, 10 months ago to random

I should make a big sign reading "it has been X days since Foone started reverse engineering a new thing", and wire it up to my Ghidras.

Today it got up to 1 days! then I reset it again

foone, 9 months ago to random

So I was thinking of a scifi setting where life evolves on a planet orbiting a star that periodically (every couple decades) hits the planet with a hemisphere-sterilizing CME.

foone, 10 months ago to random

bad news: after extensive digging into how Wheel of Fortune (2010, Wii) loads resource files, it seems that there's no way to get it to load patch files from the memory card.

It seems to only look for them on the DVD

foone, 4 months ago to random

I wonder what the easiest way to generate 4:3 NTSC video is?

foone, 7 months ago to random

I wonder if there are any long-term implications for a planet having a moon that orbits opposite the planet's rotation.
I've got one of those in a story, and it's okay, a Wizard Did It, but I'm not sure if this scenario is unstable because of how their gravity interacts. At the very least, maybe it's slowing down the rotation of the planet slightly?

foone, 1 month ago to random

My Pocket 386 arrived! It seems to have basically the same specs as the Hand386, but in a laptop form factor. There's a few new options for managing the video, and the built-in screen isn't as horribly shit this time.

foone, 7 months ago to random

I love the 1990-ass design of Railroad Tycoon's save system.
not "which directory do you want to save your game?", but "which drive has your save game disk?"

You know, cause you'd put the game in drive A:, and if you were fancy, you'd save to a blank disk in drive B:

Too poor to have two drives? Gotta swap them to save, then swap back to keep playing.

foone, 8 months ago to random

As a retrotech nerd I don't dislike cheap powerful microcontrollers, ubiquitous internet connectivity, LEDs, and LCDs/OLEDs, I just dislike how many problems they solve.

foone, 7 months ago to random

This shit should be illegal
DC 12v, and then a mini-DIN-8?
WHERE DOES THE 12V GO?

foone, 8 months ago to random

I got 3 cheap Toshiba Satellite laptops at the electronics flea market this weekend.

This one... well, it boots more than the first one, but I'm not sure I'd call it usable.

foone, 7 months ago to random

ahhhhhrhgghghr. I finally got around to digging into a Switch game for the first time, because someone wanted me to hack one, and the first thing I see is a filename:
img/unity_logo.png