Oh come on. This just gives them an excuse to get even CHEAPER engineering talent from places like India and Russia! These self-important engineers are doing them a favor by leaving. I mean they still have all the money-counting talent in house which is what's really important right?
I think the fact that they chose to put-down the plots of two of the most highly regarded platformers ever just shows that plot does not make the game. Having a decent plot is a nice feature but that's not what I look for in my games.
Last time I was doing ninja wall jumps around the levels in mario64 I wasn't thinking about character motivation or plot. I do however have several well written movies in the bookcase which don't get nearly the same amount of time on screen as my favorite games.
Things like this really make me wonder why anyone but the big studios WANT to develop big budget titles anymore. It's a huge risk and if your game happens to be a hit you're still going to get f'd in the arse by your publisher and not see the majority of the profits. It just sounds like a horrible business idea to do this.
It's painfully obvious that people want to play simpler, well done games... why don't the studios tell the big publishers to screw off and go make something that's not going to require huge amounts of funding?
Unfortunately (to answer my own question here) I have a feeling that lack-of-creativity isn't just isolated to the big publishing houses... this is what I'd imagine if a modern game studio tried this.
Boss: "Ok guys, we need to come up with a small game that's going to be fun to play and different!"
Programmer 1: "I know.. how about an FPS with... grenade launchers!"
Designer : "Pah... that's TOTALLY been done before!... we need something ORIGINAL like.. an fps with high tech microwave weapons."
Programmer 2: "I had this weird idea once. How about a game where you roll stuff up into a little ball... and the ball gets bigger and bigger until you're rolling up stuff like buildings!"
Boss, Designer, Programmer1: "GHEY!!! What's WRONG with you?!? Go back to kindergarten n00b"
How much do you want to bet that some high ranking official at the San Diego FBI office was caught cheating or at least had his email read by this program?:)
How hard is it going to be to forge these things? Once the police start relying on this stuff the tech savvy criminals are going to have it easy. Car flies through a toll at 90mph? Don't need cameras anymore...we have the rfid of the car. (it HAS to be the right car because the company that sold us this stuff said it can't be fooled... )
Bittorrent?
on
SHA-1 Broken
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Is it time to update bittorrent? How hard is it going to be for people to provide garbage data with correct SHA-1 hashes to screw up downloads?
So I was reading the DaVinci Code and the main characters discovered that the account number for a swiss bank account was the first several digits of the Fibbonaci sequence.
The first thing I thought to myself was: "That sounds like the combination some GENIUS would have on his luggage!"
I think while game developers a whining about rediculous resource limitations the creative developers will be doing sensible things like creating algorithmic game assets using iterative fractals or some other more advanced techniques. In the end you'll have products that are smaller, faster, and cheaper to produce.
I guess the lack of creativity isn't surprising considering that Epic is still making the same old FPS games.
Re:Reverse Engineered Without Documentation? So?
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 1
The code IS reverse engineered. At our performance shope we dump all the machine code and document it heavily. We have logic flowcharts. We know what the parameters do based off of how the factory diagnostic tools read information from the computers. We use dynomomters, extra sensors, torque measuring dynos, and data acquisition equipment. Sometimes you find out the limits of a car that is being tuned/developed specifically for racing and you tune consumer cars much more conservatively.
Re:Why why why
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Hackers aren't engineers. That's why the hackers work WITH engineers to do a proper job. I reverse engineered the Subaru WRX computer as part of my job and I wouldn't even think of trying to change major values myself. That's left up to a trained professional who develops the maps using a chasis dynomometer and software that I've written.
I'm the computer nerd who does ECU work for Cobb Tuning. Most people don't realize that Trey (the man who started it all) is a competent computer engineer/programmer himself. He did tons of work reverse engineering the logic flow of the wrx ECU to find out how things work.
We have a pretty broad talent base at the shop and it allows us to do pretty amazing things. We're expanding the computer end of things and even recently hired someone to write software full time. There are tons of applications that could use some good software... the trouble is just finding them.
Anyone working with surface mount components needs to check out ChipQuick. It's a solder-like material that you melt into the solder on your components. It lowers the melting point of the solder enough that you can use a standard iron for most anything.
I've used it quite a bit to pull 160 pin qfp packaged chips off of boards.
I was thinking the same thing. It doesn't look like it would work although I bet you could cover your copper board with an etchant resist and burn that off with a laser. Then you could put the board in a chemical bath.
I bet there are much less expensive ways to do this though:)
No... the owner, Chris, was not driving the car when it hit the water truck. I work at Cobb Tuning and got the story first hand from the people that were there.
Sure they probably paid for it... but I bet they aren't going to be throwing away money like that in the near future:)
Not after they (Sport Compact Car) ran the Cobb Tuning project WRX into a water truck causing $22k of damage! See the April 2003 magazine for a shot of the car on the front (and inside for the accordian version) and also see http://www.projectcobb.com/conebasher/ for the car. *425hp to the wheels!*
This technique is only really suitable for special case surface mount soldering.
If you're not using surface mount components (like mod chips) you're going to have to use a soldering iron anyway.
The key to making any iron work easy (even surface mount!) is to use plenty of flux. Get a seperate container of just flux and don't be afraid to use it. It makes a WORLD of difference.
Back when I was a wee tot and playing ET on my 2600. (I didn't have alot of toys) I stumbled upon an easter egg on accident. A flower pot at the bottom of a pit suddenly turned int a YAR from yars revenge and flew off the screen!
I'd never seen any sort of easter egg at this point in my life and I freaked out pretty badly.
I told this story to my friends for YEARS and noone took me seriously. It wasn't until sometime around last year that I found a text by the original game author verifying the easter egg. (it was much more complex and I never found the rest of it)
Frankly I'm amazed that I found it at all considering what you had to do. I'm sure the programmer would have LOVED to have seen my face at the time of discovery.
THIS is what easter eggs are about. Not the 99% of the people who use your program but the 1 guy who nearly pisses himself when he finds it on accident.
I've been in the ps2 homebrew dev scene and here are a few things that people need to know about the ps2 protection.
The ps2 checks the protection once when the disk is loaded. It's possible and very easy to do a swap trick using a gameshark2 or a codebreaker cheat disk. I wired up an override switch for the tray motor on my ps2 using 2 dpdt switches and a diode. (pull +5v from the mainboard and run it through the diode to drop the voltage a bit before wiring to the drive tray motor)
There is plenty of info online on how to do this.
Check current modchip diagrams for where to get +5v and grnd.
A ps2 drive will read ps2 and ps1 disks. It's possible to make the ps2 run a ps1 disk as if it were a ps2 disk. This is how all the ps2 modchips work. Put a ps1 modchip in your ps2 and do a swap with a gameshark (no switch needed). The ps2 will think it's a ps1 disk and the gameshark/codebreaker will boot it as if it were a ps2 disk. (no switches needed)
Now the most convenient solution is to patch the ps2 rom so that it can decide how to boot a disk by using some other method than the protection.
This is how the latest mods work (neo4/messiah).
It's also doable by any determined hardware hacker. I expect very simple instructions to surface soon especially if the modchips get pushed underground.
DISCLAIMER:
I'm only a programmer and practically none of this info was discovered by me. I'll credit anyone who wants me to:)
One thing that is quite common is for the drive to go bad on a dreamcast. Find an old broken unit and replace the drive with a drive from a new non-cdr bootable unit and the old unit will be able to boot cd-rs again.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh come on. This just gives them an excuse to get even CHEAPER engineering talent from places like India and Russia! These self-important engineers are doing them a favor by leaving. I mean they still have all the money-counting talent in house which is what's really important right?
I think the fact that they chose to put-down the plots of two of the most highly regarded platformers ever just shows that plot does not make the game. Having a decent plot is a nice feature but that's not what I look for in my games.
Last time I was doing ninja wall jumps around the levels in mario64 I wasn't thinking about character motivation or plot. I do however have several well written movies in the bookcase which don't get nearly the same amount of time on screen as my favorite games.
Just keep on hyping up your new security up until launch. Thay way you look like even bigger 4$$holes when it all comes crashing down.
Things like this really make me wonder why anyone but the big studios WANT to develop big budget titles anymore. It's a huge risk and if your game happens to be a hit you're still going to get f'd in the arse by your publisher and not see the majority of the profits. It just sounds like a horrible business idea to do this.
It's painfully obvious that people want to play simpler, well done games... why don't the studios tell the big publishers to screw off and go make something that's not going to require huge amounts of funding?
Unfortunately (to answer my own question here) I have a feeling that lack-of-creativity isn't just isolated to the big publishing houses... this is what I'd imagine if a modern game studio tried this.
Boss: "Ok guys, we need to come up with a small game that's going to be fun to play and different!"
Programmer 1: "I know.. how about an FPS with... grenade launchers!"
Designer : "Pah... that's TOTALLY been done before!... we need something ORIGINAL like.. an fps with high tech microwave weapons."
Programmer 2: "I had this weird idea once. How about a game where you roll stuff up into a little ball... and the ball gets bigger and bigger until you're rolling up stuff like buildings!"
Boss, Designer, Programmer1: "GHEY!!! What's WRONG with you?!? Go back to kindergarten n00b"
How much do you want to bet that some high ranking official at the San Diego FBI office was caught cheating or at least had his email read by this program? :)
How hard is it going to be to forge these things? Once the police start relying on this stuff the tech savvy criminals are going to have it easy. Car flies through a toll at 90mph? Don't need cameras anymore...we have the rfid of the car. (it HAS to be the right car because the company that sold us this stuff said it can't be fooled... )
Is it time to update bittorrent?
How hard is it going to be for people to provide garbage data with correct SHA-1 hashes to screw up downloads?
So I was reading the DaVinci Code and the main characters discovered that the account number for a swiss bank account was the first several digits of the Fibbonaci sequence.
The first thing I thought to myself was:
"That sounds like the combination some GENIUS would have on his luggage!"
What kind of geek are you MAN?
Grab that soldering iron and get to work!
I swear sometimes we need a nerd bootcamp.
2 Gig of data loaded into ram to run a game?!?
I think while game developers a whining about rediculous resource limitations the creative developers will be doing sensible things like creating algorithmic game assets using iterative fractals or some other more advanced techniques. In the end you'll have products that are smaller, faster, and cheaper to produce.
I guess the lack of creativity isn't surprising considering that Epic is still making the same old FPS games.
The code IS reverse engineered. At our performance shope we dump all the machine code and document it heavily. We have logic flowcharts. We know what the parameters do based off of how the factory diagnostic tools read information from the computers. We use dynomomters, extra sensors, torque measuring dynos, and data acquisition equipment. Sometimes you find out the limits of a car that is being tuned/developed specifically for racing and you tune consumer cars much more conservatively.
Hackers aren't engineers. That's why the hackers work WITH engineers to do a proper job. I reverse engineered the Subaru WRX computer as part of my job and I wouldn't even think of trying to change major values myself. That's left up to a trained professional who develops the maps using a chasis dynomometer and software that I've written.
Not when the user community is still making picross games.
It's just a classic example of security through absurdity.
When will people learn that THIS NEVER WORKS.
I'm the computer nerd who does ECU work for Cobb Tuning. Most people don't realize that Trey (the man who started it all) is a competent computer engineer/programmer himself. He did tons of work reverse engineering the logic flow of the wrx ECU to find out how things work.
We have a pretty broad talent base at the shop and it allows us to do pretty amazing things. We're expanding the computer end of things and even recently hired someone to write software full time. There are tons of applications that could use some good software... the trouble is just finding them.
Anyone working with surface mount components needs to check out ChipQuick. It's a solder-like material that you melt into the solder on your components. It lowers the melting point of the solder enough that you can use a standard iron for most anything.
I've used it quite a bit to pull 160 pin qfp packaged chips off of boards.
I was thinking the same thing. It doesn't look like it would work although I bet you could cover your copper board with an etchant resist and burn that off with a laser.
Then you could put the board in a chemical bath.
I bet there are much less expensive ways to do this though
No... the owner, Chris, was not driving the car when it hit the water truck. I work at Cobb Tuning and got the story first hand from the people that were there.
Sure they probably paid for it... but I bet they aren't going to be throwing away money like that in the near future
Not after they (Sport Compact Car) ran the Cobb Tuning project WRX into a water truck causing $22k of damage!
See the April 2003 magazine for a shot of the car on the front (and inside for the accordian version) and also see http://www.projectcobb.com/conebasher/ for the car. *425hp to the wheels!*
This technique is only really suitable for special case surface mount soldering.
If you're not using surface mount components (like mod chips) you're going to have to use a soldering iron anyway.
The key to making any iron work easy (even surface mount!) is to use plenty of flux.
Get a seperate container of just flux and don't be afraid to use it. It makes a WORLD of difference.
Back when I was a wee tot and playing ET on my 2600. (I didn't have alot of toys) I stumbled upon an easter egg on accident. A flower pot at the bottom of a pit suddenly turned int a YAR from yars revenge and flew off the screen!
I'd never seen any sort of easter egg at this point in my life and I freaked out pretty badly.
I told this story to my friends for YEARS and noone took me seriously. It wasn't until sometime around last year that I found a text by the original game author verifying the easter egg. (it was much more complex and I never found the rest of it)
Frankly I'm amazed that I found it at all considering what you had to do. I'm sure the programmer would have LOVED to have seen my face at the time of discovery.
THIS is what easter eggs are about. Not the 99% of the people who use your program but the 1 guy who nearly pisses himself when he finds it on accident.
Man.. at $1.5k I might as well PAY for my music!
And here's how to use it.
I've been in the ps2 homebrew dev scene and here are a few things that people need to know about the ps2 protection.
The ps2 checks the protection once when the disk is loaded. It's possible and very easy to do a swap trick using a gameshark2 or a codebreaker cheat disk. I wired up an override switch for the tray motor on my ps2 using 2 dpdt switches and a diode. (pull +5v from the mainboard and run it through the diode to drop the voltage a bit before wiring to the drive tray motor)
There is plenty of info online on how to do this.
Check current modchip diagrams for where to get +5v and grnd.
A ps2 drive will read ps2 and ps1 disks. It's possible to make the ps2 run a ps1 disk as if it were a ps2 disk. This is how all the ps2 modchips work. Put a ps1 modchip in your ps2 and do a swap with a gameshark (no switch needed). The ps2 will think it's a ps1 disk and the gameshark/codebreaker will boot it as if it were a ps2 disk. (no switches needed)
Now the most convenient solution is to patch the ps2 rom so that it can decide how to boot a disk by using some other method than the protection.
This is how the latest mods work (neo4/messiah).
It's also doable by any determined hardware hacker. I expect very simple instructions to surface soon especially if the modchips get pushed underground.
DISCLAIMER:
I'm only a programmer and practically none of this info was discovered by me. I'll credit anyone who wants me to
Just curious.. has anyone compiled a list of known spammers and their home addresses?
One thing that is quite common is for the drive to go bad on a dreamcast. Find an old broken unit and replace the drive with a drive from a new non-cdr bootable unit and the old unit will be able to boot cd-rs again.
Or so I hear