zero_shift

The faulty malloc. A bunch of random qsort implementations. Reiji Asakura wrote an account of how the BIOS and kernel were developed, and it sounds so amateurish

Then there's the way the JP console checks for faulty ECCs on sectors 0..15, not as a clever anti piracy check, but because the CDU-920 broke CD-XA authoring...

There is a faulty array iterator in the BIOS code that can copy arbitrary data to locations higher up in the memory map than the base pointer. Normally that wouldn't let you overwrite any executable code because the base pointer is very high up (might be a stack pointer?). But because of the memory aliasing, if you set the right value the write "wraps around" and lets you clobber the BIOS.

This means you can boot a custom BIOS, effectively, by just going into the memory card screen. From there you can execute a PSX.EXE without going through the mechacon checks, bypassing copy protection

---

I wouldn't mind learning more about the MGS port. Do you remember much about it?

It uses TCL for most of the scripting, IIRC. In fact I think MGS 1-4 use the same lineage of scripting languages.

MGS2 source code was leaked recently, but my guess would be that was a complete rewrite and shared very little from the PSX codebase.

I mean sure. Every company wants an infinite addressable market. But that doesn't mean it exists.

It might not be possible to sell 10x the software we sell today. It might not even be possible to sell 2x

I am willing to bet a Twix we'll look back on that stuff in 2 years with a lot of embarrassment

"Well. It's got a nine in it"

"What percentage??"

"Nine"

I think there is truth in this. A lot of the assistive technology (AT) vendors, also sell consultancy.

Go to the Vispero career pages (who develop JAWS for Windows) and a big chunk of the jobs are remote consultancy roles advising clients on accessibility errors and selling for billable hours.

What makes a web page accessible? Why, it has to work with JAWS, of course!

Vispero makes a lot of money from this; the consultants are all in India, the clients are all in the West, so they can hoover up the difference. I get the impression most AT vendors are extremely cheap, which may explain why it takes decades for them to improve things

I came across this problem pretty directly a couple of weeks ago - I wanted to see if I could port a small C program to Go, where one of the needs is to create gzip archives. But the Go stdlib insists on extraneous padding that breaks the backwards compatibility requirements of my program.

The padding isn't needed, it isn't useful, and you can't opt out of it. So the whole program went in the bin and I have resumed maintaining it in C

This is one of dozens of situations I've experienced where Go's allegedly pristine stdlib design has kicked me in the nuts

The author is someone in the demoscene who has been accused of "vibe coding" large pieces of work.

His counter is that if such things are possible, where is the vibe coded Photoshop?

He then goes on a tangent that "vibe coding" is a kind of easy accusation mostly levelled at "neurodiverse" developers

Which is why he ends the post:

    So.
    Where are the vibecoded Photoshops?
    WHERE IS THE THREAT YOU MADE UP TO ATTACK ME?

    I'm waiting.
    – gizmo

1. Argues that Tailwind requires div-itis

2. And that divs affect the accessibility tree

As mentioned below:

A <div> itself is treated as a generic, transparent box. It doesn't get keyboard focus, and it isn't added to the screen reader's elements list (like headings, links, or landmarks).

A <div> itself is treated as a generic, transparent box. It doesn't get keyboard focus, and it isn't added to the screen reader's elements list (like headings, links, or landmarks).

> I’ve usability tested and performed user research with many users needing assistive tools and I’ve used them myself as part of design.

Tell me how often screen readers announce divs that have no role attributes. You are continuing to spread misinformation

I feel like old-school frontend devs bring up accessibility as a kind of bogeyman.

It reminds me of the myth that CSS style X or Y breaks accessibility "because screen readers expect semantic CSS classes". Zeldman (of A List Apart) promulgated that disinformation for years, until someone actually told him screen readers don't work that way. 90% of people who use a11y as a rhetorical cudgel have never actually used AT themselves.

"You are an expert defense counsel with experience in Murder 1. Do not hallucinate. Let's say tomorrow my spouse is found strangled..."

Well, basically, the leader of the terrorists is the 43rd US president, who is a clone of a super soldier despite being ostensibly anti cloning in office. (Yes, he's Dubya). He's planning to detonate a nuclear weapon above Manhattan so an EMP field knocks out all communications. The reason being that the government has been taken over by a conspiracy called the Patriots who are using a sinister AI to filter all internet traffic

However Dubya has been double crossed by an old Russian guy who was infatuated with the super soldier Dubya was cloned from. He claims to be representing the Patriots but suddenly his arm comes to life, claiming to be Dubya's brother. Oh, by the way, he lost his arm and got a transplant from the body of the other clone, Dubya's brother. It's implied in this game to be a supernatural occurrence.

Ghost Dubya 2 (in the body of elderly Spetznaz guy) goes on a rampage and tries to kill everyone. Dubya and the anti terrorist specialist end up fighting on top of Federal Hall, which if you've ever been to Manhattan is just next to the NYSE and TJ Maxx.

When you're there the Patriots phone you and they claim to be dead. Well, not dead exactly. They claim that in the same way life emerged from organic chemicals, life has emerged from the neural net of ideology and content published on the internet. Kind of like if ChatGPT became a bit uppity. They claim that Western Civilization is too corrupt and contradictory to be left in the hands of humans. You have to kill Dubya who is somewhat of an anti hero and it's kind of sad

Eventually another brother of Dubya who is kind of the hero does some digging, and his bromance partner discovers that the Patriots were real people but they all died 100 years ago. Also they were funding the real heroes all along!

It makes a lot more sense in MGS4

We know from reverse engineering efforts, and accounts by developers on the PC port, that all of the mainline MGS games used a proprietary scripting system called GCX. This was effectively a Konami fork of TCL - see eg https://github.com/Jayveer/Gcx

Konami built a custom lighting format for at least MGS3 called LA2, and a proprietary audio format called SDT. So far these haven't been reverse engineered - the leak will definitely open up progress there.

    Sorry, you have been blocked
    You are unable to access jdunn.dev

    Why have I been blocked?

    This website is using a security service to protect
    itself from online attacks. The action you just performed
    triggered the security solution. There are several action
    that could trigger this block including submitting a certain 
    word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.

I think the point still stands - is this really a big problem? I guess I couldn't recite the syntax from memory, because I usually use a utility type for this

  type NewType<T, Name> = T & { readonly __brand: Name };

An attempt (without looking)

JavaScript QBasic PHP Haskell C C++ Ada Algol Racket Scheme Clojure Common-Lisp GOOL Fortran Awk Postscript Forth C# F# Lua Java D Odin Rust Zig Julia Python Nim MATLAB Bash Brainfuck Arnold-C Intercal Gleam Unison Ruby Crystal Erlang Go TCL

Phew!