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seritools

704 karma · joined May 25, 2020

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seritools··on Mathematical Billiards (2024)
I assume posted because of the latest 2swap video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL9BTbIGxLg
seritools··on Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
> Personally, I did not learn that much from that experience.

What did you expect?

seritools··on The Road to MS-DOS 2.0
no, Windows still leaves that to the program. Usually handled by the msvc runtime for argv/argc, but the base windows API is GetCommandLine, giving you a single string.

EDIT: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2022/02/18/

seritools··on Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
What's the point you're trying to make?
seritools··on uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook
why not "just" do it for them?
seritools··on Tail-Call Interpreters in Rust – Jimmy Ostler
on my screen it's the opposite: the glow makes it look like i didn't clean my glasses for a month, disabling that `text-shadow` makes it readable, and the slight scanline effect is nice
seritools··on Superoptimizer – A Look at the Smallest Program (1987) [pdf]
(1987)
seritools··on Asymmetric Quantization: Near-Lossless Retrieval with 97% Storage Reduction
near lossless refers to being 89.65/90.26 = 99.32% of baseline, i'm pretty sure.
seritools··on Windows 95 contained a workaround for a SimCity 2000 memory bug
just look at that giant 8-line headline, insanity
seritools··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
then add a second r and it's suddenly piracy or torrent related!
seritools··on Make ZIP files smaller with ZIP Shrinker
> This has the side effect of removing empty directories

yeah, this will inevitably break things. excluding those from the directory stripping shouldn't be too hard (TM)

seritools··on Your hex editor should color-code bytes
as far as i can tell, no it does not. it only desaturates 00 in particular. the other colors you see in the screenshots come from matched formats/patterns. it does not do direct coloring based on byte value.
seritools··on Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux
pretty sure 486 support only _just_ got disabled, and will be gone with 7.1: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Phasing-Out-i486
seritools··on Smoking ban for people born after 2008 in the UK agreed
headlines often trade legibility for terseness, sometimes a bit too much though :)

EDIT: Headlinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headline#Headlinese

seritools··on Direct Win32 API, weird-shaped windows, and why they mostly disappeared
> I miss the wobbly windows I had in Linux when we started playing with Compiz.

KDE still has them: Settings -> Window Management -> Desktop Effects -> Wobbly Windows

seritools··on Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
you can also just uninstall the "new" notepad, at which point Windows will let you run the old one again (which is still shipped!).

By using a version that is _that_ old you do lose out on some of the actually useful updates legacy nodepad received, such as LF line ending support.

seritools··on Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
You are mistaken:

> The malicious code would execute in the security context of the user who opened the Markdown file, giving the attacker the same permissions as that user.

seritools··on Rust at Scale: An Added Layer of Security for WhatsApp
TIL I'm an AI
seritools··on Ask HN: Anyone have a good solution for modern Mac to legacy SCSI converters?
not even opposite, as mentioned in my comment it does have Initiator Mode, allowing it to act as a host
seritools··on Ask HN: Anyone have a good solution for modern Mac to legacy SCSI converters?
If the reason to connect them is to dump them, something like https://bluescsi.com/ in Initiator Mode might work: https://bluescsi.com/docs/Initiator-Mode
seritools··on I tried Gleam for Advent of Code
For a quick fix: `font-variant-ligatures: none;` on body or similar.
seritools··on Microsoft makes Zork open-source
Infocom was bought by Activision, ActivisionBlizzard was bought by Microsoft.
seritools··on Unofficial "Tier 4" Rust Target for older Windows versions
Author here -- previous discussions/blog posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23313577

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31112273

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37787161

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38810782

seritools··on Why Castrol Honda Superbike crashes on (most) modern systems
I specifically checked if DirectInput from DirectX 5 already supports/provides USB HID devices, and it does! Granted, even then it was unlikely to encounter 8 USB devices, let alone HID devices in particular.
seritools··on Why Castrol Honda Superbike crashes on (most) modern systems
Because I felt like it :) Also works for multiple versions/patchlevels.

But yeah, with the info provided it should be patchable. It's a `push esi` though, where esi has to stay 0 for a few further usages, so it's a bit more than a one-byte patch. It also wouldn't fully resolve the OOB write in the rare case where you _do_ have 9+ game controllers connected.

seritools··on Why Castrol Honda Superbike crashes on (most) modern systems
Usually dgVoodoo handles most of the games (that don't have actual bugs like this game) fairly well.

Otherwise, 86Box is a pretty good full-system emulator for everything up to the early 3D era.

As for DRM, there's various ways around it of course :)

seritools··on Why Castrol Honda Superbike crashes on (most) modern systems
> am I right in thinking the DirectX library only exports a single function and _everything_ else is through DX interfaces

Yup! That's why I didn't have to create a gazillion passthrough functions.

The original DLL in my modern Windows installation has these 8 exports:

    DirectInputCreateA
    DirectInputCreateEx
    DirectInputCreateW
    DllCanUnloadNow
    DllGetClassObject
    DllRegisterServer
    DllUnregisterServer
The game only calls DirectInputCreateA, and the rest happens via the COM object that that function creates.
seritools··on Why Castrol Honda Superbike crashes on (most) modern systems
Author here -- given that r9x is also my project it wasn't entirely random :^)
seritools··on Why Castrol Honda Superbike crashes on (most) modern systems
AFAIK they are all backed up. For the blogpost I used the DX5 SDK docs, DX7 SDK docs, and the MSDN Library from VS2005 (last version to include 9x information).

The VS2008 version purged all API information regarding pre-Windows 2000.

seritools··on Thunk: Build Rust program to support Windows XP, Vista and more
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_C%2B%2B#Histo..., the last version to support Win3.1 is VC++ 1.52 (which was shipped with VC++ up to version 4).

Unless you mean NT3.1 of course :^)

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