General Development Archive

Cooper Harasyn found a Super Mario World save corruption glitch, and we worked together to create a jailbreak that works on real, unmodified cartridges and Super Nintendos.

Arcan is a powerful development framework for creating virtually anything between user interfaces for specialised embedded applications all the way to full-blown standalone desktop environments.

At its heart lies a robust and portable multimedia engine, with a well-tested and well-documented interface, programmable in Lua. At every step of the way, the underlying development emphasises security, performance and debugability guided by a principle of least surprise in terms of API design.

Modern computer science is dominated by men. But it hasn't always been this way.

A lot of computing pioneers - the people who programmed the first digital computers - were women. And for decades, the number of women studying computer science was growing faster than the number of men. But in 1984, something changed. The percentage of women in computer science flattened, and then plunged, even as the share of women in other technical and professional fields kept rising.

What happened?

I decided I wanted to hack Final Fantasy 1, one of my favorite games growing up, that I put in more than 100 hours playing. I used fceux as my NES emulator, same as in the video and followed mostly the same patterns.

I kept some notes on how I did it and thought others might find the process as interesting and fun as I did. I ended up losing most of the notes from a few years ago, so I went back and rediscovered the different memory locations and values to use again.

In this article we'll walk through an example of how to interpret a closed source program, how to analyze its behavior, and how to ultimately alter that behavior to do what we want. These techniques are well known within many circles, but few tutorials exist to help people get started. The context for this example investigation is the linker's subsystem field generation, but the techniques can be applied to other problems that seem interesting.

Probably you asked yourself at least once, how an Operating System (OS) was written from the ground up? You probably have spent years programming, but still understand operating system as a collection of abstract concepts, not how to implement an operating system in actual code. In your mind, somehow the operating system can magically control the underlying hardware and do what you want through the higher level API of your favorite programming language. You wish to understand the details, but for some reason, it seems too difficult because regardless how much you learn, it is never enough. You may feel that you are missing an important piece of the puzzle, and get stuck. However, deep inside you still want to write an operating system without a crystal clear understanding. After all, you are a software engineer, and an operating system is a software. You should know your software better than anyone else!

If that is the case, this book is for you. By going through this book, you will be able to find the missing piece that is essential and enable you to implement your operating system, from scratch!

This release represents over a year of development effort and around 6,600 individual changes. The main highlights are the support for Microsoft Office 2013, and the 64-bit support on macOS.

It also contains a lot of improvements across the board, as well as support for many new applications and games. See the release notes below for a summary of the major changes.

I'm going to use PICO-8, which its creator, Joseph "Zep" White, calls a 'fantasy console', but really it's like an indie-fied emulator of the computers I grew up with, like the BBC B. When you start it, you're presented with a 128 by 128 pixel display glitching into life, this little do-do-do-do! jingle, and a command prompt.

Everything you need to make games is right there: a mini Lua code editor, sprite and map editors, and sound and music editors. It's reactive, instant to test to see if things work, and generally delightful. And the stuff people have made in it is extraordinary. Little short-form games: colourful, fun, immediate, varied. Type SPLORE into the command prompt and this little browser for games posted to the PICO-8 forum comes up. Since no game, including its graphics, is bigger than a 65K text file, you're playing them pretty much instantly. It's lovely.

This text is a practical guide to writing your own x86 operating system. It is designed to give enough help with the technical details while at the same time not reveal too much with samples and code excerpts. We've tried to collect parts of the vast (and often excellent) expanse of material and tutorials available, on the web and otherwise, and add our own insights into the problems we encountered and struggled with.

GCC 6.3 is a bug-fix release from the GCC 6 branch containing important fixes for regressions and serious bugs in GCC 6.2 with more than 79 bugs fixed since the previous release.

When you have built your retro computer the chances are you’ll turn it on and be faced with a BASIC interpreter prompt. This was the standard interface for home computers of the 8-bit era, one from which very few products deviated. If you were a teenager plugging your family's first ever computer into the living-room TV then your first port of call after getting bored with the cassette of free educational games that came with it would have been to open the manual and immerse yourself in programming.

The trouble is, in the several decades since, 8-bit BASIC skills have waned a little. Most people under 40 will have rarely if ever encountered it, and the generation who were there on the living room carpet with their Commodore 64s (or whatever) would probably not care to admit that this is the sum total of their remembered BASIC knowledge.

10 PRINT "Hello World"
20 GOTO 10

If you have built a retro-computer then clearly this is a listing whose appeal will quickly wane, so where can you brush up your 8-bit BASIC skills several decades after the demise of 8-bit home computers?

The 1.13 release includes several extensions to the language, including the long-awaited ? operator, improvements to compile times, minor feature additions to cargo and the standard library. This release also includes many small enhancements to documentation and error reporting, by many contributors, that are not individually mentioned in the release notes.

The goal of this project is to preserve and present primary and secondary source materials (including specifications, source code, manuals, and papers discussing design and implementation) from Mesa, the system programming language designed at Xerox PARC in the 1970s and used to implement the Xerox Star office automation system and its follow-ons. The editor greatly appreciates comments, suggestions, and donations of additional materials.

By now, simply taking over a game and replacing it with a brand new app was beginning to feel a little predictable. So this year, TASBot decided to show off a new skill. At the AGDQ marathon, the bot set out to edit new features onto a game that's still running in active memory. TASBot wanted to be magnanimous with its new capabilities, too, allowing human players (and livestream viewers) the opportunity to edit the game on the fly.

But just how did TASBot - and the team of coders behind it - intend to turn an old game of Super Mario World, running on a standard SNES, into a heavily editable game of Super Mario Maker? Luckily, we had a behind-the-scenes invite to the event and the opportunity to find out.