11 ms·
Pilotwings demos act differently depending on when the cartridge was made
- spilk 8y agoTwitter is the worst platform for long-form content like this.
- kabacha 8y ago> Twitter is the worst platform Ftfy Seriously twitter is one of few things I hate with a passion. Everything about it stinks. I don't even use twitter but I randomly get rate limited: "you can't see this content because your rate is too high" - first time I click on twitter link in two weeks. It's just mind boggling how it became so big while being so absurdly terrible.
- tty2300 8y agoThis happens every time for me and a bunch of others have reported it. I think it's meant to be a dark pattern to get you to use the app. To get around it you have to reload the page from the browser reload button.
- kabacha 8y agoFunny how this dark pattern pushed me to never use twitter again though I'd be willing to bet it works more often than it doesn't.
- funwithjustin 8y agoI both agree and disagree. It's a terrible way to read anything long-form, but in the case of a suspenseful story like this it's pretty great.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mariedm 8y agoIf you don’t like to read long-form content on Twitter, use Threader. (Disclaimer: I built it). It turns Twitter threads into a single page article. > https://threader.app/thread/1126996260026605568 https://threader.app/thread/1126996260026605568
- userbinator 8y agoThere is a good debugging advice related to this story: "if your code is the same but suddenly starts behaving differently, check for hidden state."
- alanbernstein 8y agoIt's more like code than state, isn't it? The thing that changed is the implementation of a circuit for computing the result of some calculation, i.e. a function.
- sgillen 8y agoI very often think of the current definitions of functions as part of the program state.
- DDR0 8y agoYou're right – but I don't think "hardware" usually counts as state!
- kibwen 8y agoWe don't generally count hardware as state because we expect it to be a reliable abstraction, but this same attitude applies to other things we do too: note that any program you've ever compiled can also count the compiler itself as state; this is the whole foundation for trusting-trust attacks!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- krz 8y agoI usually say “check environment”, which is usually the reason — cron jobs run in non-interactive mode, new version of system library, wrong PATH variable, new math co-processor and so on.
- anyfoo 8y agoI often enjoy foone’s discoveries, and this was a particularly interesting one. I just wish it wasn’t all on Twitter. Why not put the text, plus pictures and whatever else (links?), into a blog posting, or just some HTML page with basic formatting? And then link to it with just the first Twitter post. Provide an RSS feed if you feel extra charitable (which is the way I enjoy most of the content related to this that I read). On Twitter alone, it’s just terrible. That being said, while the format is terrible, the actual content here is brilliant, especially in that level of detail, and exactly what I’m looking for on Hacker News.
- caprese 8y agoLess clickthroughs = more engagement = better viral loop Thats the why, since you asked
- anyfoo 8y agoSomehow I don’t think that’s foone’s motivation at all.
- caprese 8y agoWhy not? There is a patreon page linked right on his twitter page. He may not be exchanging time for food and shelter, but he is playing the same marketing game as anyone else for a personal high score. linking to a blog he has to maintain would drop engagement off a cliff
- ngold 8y agoSo money? Or exposure? I just don't get it. It is literally text messages.
- kurtisc 8y agoExposure to content is the reason HN exists and why you're reading it at all. If it wasn't posted on Twitter, OP may never have found it (even if a link to a private blog was posted to Twitter) and never shared it for you to read.
- berberous 8y agoI've recommended @foone's feed on here before, but I'll do it again now. I don't even know who this guy is or how I started following him, but his feed is full of interesting fun threads like this, often looking at older tech like this. I think most people on here would really enjoy following him.
- LeoPanthera 8y agoHis Twitter is Patreon funded which he literally never advertises, so I will do it for him. https://www.patreon.com/foone https://www.patreon.com/foone
- dqybh 8y agoIt's "literally" in the bio.
- RandomGuyDTB 8y agoI haven't seen him tweet about it once.
- soulofmischief 8y agoYeah, he's got some good stuff. I really appreciated his thread on human vision. I learned a lot. https://twitter.com/i/moments/1016910004262088704 https://twitter.com/i/moments/1016910004262088704
- Shakahs 8y agoTLDR: Some NES game cartridges contained coprocessors. The Pilotwings math coprocessor had 3 revisions and one of them produces slightly different outputs, even though the game ROM is identical. Star Fox had a 2D/3D chip called Super FX that sounds a lot like a GPU. It’s pretty cool that console games of that era could augment your existing hardware to support their requirements.
- city41 8y agoSmall correction, these are SNES games. The extra chips on NES games were primarily memory mappers and not as interesting as what SNES games did.
- aidenn0 8y agoEven though the NES chips were still called "mappers" some of the later chips did a lot more, particularly on the Famicom, where cartridges could add extra sound channels. Even on the NES though you saw some minor graphics enhancements.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- JohnBooty 8y agoThe most hilarious enhancement chip is the SA-1, used in the Super Mario RPG and other games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_chips#SA1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_... It's essentially the same exact chip as the SNES's main CPU. Except three times faster. Imagine buying a game for your 3ghz PC that ships on a flash drive. And that flash drive also contains a 9hz (edit: whoops, 9ghz, haha) Intel Core i9 CPU.
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y agoThis was almost a thing with Xeon Phi... 57 CPU cores for 2 slots...
- ryandrake 8y ago
- mwest 8y agoUnrolled version: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1126996260026605568.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1126996260026605568.html Great story!
- memco 8y agoFor all those who hate trying to read this as a tweet: please see parents’ link. There’s a whole site built to compile all these into a blog like thing for you.
- univerio 8y ago> you carefully dump acid on them, and you visually extract the ROM data. Super interested in how that works. Do they literally map out the chip at a transistor/gate level?
- xvf22 8y agoYup check out https://hackaday.com/2017/05/02/how-to-reverse-engineer-a-chip/ https://hackaday.com/2017/05/02/how-to-reverse-engineer-a-ch... and Ken Shirriff's excellent blog http://www.righto.com/search/label/reverse-engineering http://www.righto.com/search/label/reverse-engineering
- dzmien 8y agoCheck out this talk by Chris Gerlinsky at 33c3 (2016)[1] about how he went about cracking the encryption of cable/satellite television set-top boxes. It is a very detailed talk, and he goes into detail about delaminating a ROM chip and visually extracting the contents of its memory bit-by-bit using a microscope and then software to speed things up a little. It's a long talk so he goes into more detail about the rest of the process, but I really enjoyed it. [1] https://youtu.be/lhbSD1Jba0Q https://youtu.be/lhbSD1Jba0Q
- b_tterc_p 8y agoAh interesting, the demo changes based on the state. In a way it's a growing organism.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- meddlepal 8y agoI'm just gonna say Pilotwings 64 is one of the few games out there that really hasn't had a ~proper~ sequel. Come on Nintendo.
- asciimov 8y agoPilotwings (SNES) would like a word with you.
- Infernal 8y agoBut SNES was before N64 - this person (me too!) wants a Pilotwings 64 sequel!
- asciimov 8y agoI was commenting about the SNES version of Pilotwings also not having a proper sequel. Been wanting one since '92 or so, don't remember when I beat it for the first time. Also, my copy of Pilotwings the Biplane crashes, always thought it was weird that the demo would do that. Guess I'm gonna have to find a copy with the other chip.
- Infernal 8y agoOh! I was assuming the N64 version was a sequel of the SNES version. Never thought of them as unrelated.
- meddlepal 8y agoPilotwings 64 was a sequel. I'll be honest I never played the SNES version as I had a Genesis instead of an SNES around that time so maybe the SNES version had different mechanics that the previous poster missed in the N64 version and he doesn't consider it a true sequel. Not quite sure...
- asciimov 8y ago
- capsulecorp 8y agoI enjoyed this but I hate twitter as the delivery method for things of this length. Its a terrible way to digest the content.
- Nuzzerino 8y agoCame here to say the same. Someone needs to tell these people that Twitter is not a blogging service...
- growt 8y agoMaybe he is emulating a blogging service with restricted technology?
- 83457 8y agoThe 5 1/4 disk blogging platform.
- fao_ 8y agoBut... that's exactly what it is
- djsumdog 8y agoIt's a microblog service. It's funny that Twitter originally came from the idea of just having a list/feed of AIM/Yahoo Messenger away messages. It's about using the right tools for the job, and in this case, a regular long form blog post or a video is a much better tool than a ton of chained Tweets.
- icelancer 8y agoOr you should be a little more sensitive and read about the OP and why he doesn't use a blog (severe ADHD).
- MasterScrat 8y agoSource?
- thomasfortes 8y agoGreat content, and then I followed @foone and one of the recommended people was another account that I just followed because the pinned tweet was this: https://twitter.com/TubeTimeUS/status/732005292808900608 https://twitter.com/TubeTimeUS/status/732005292808900608 I saw it before and probably on HN itself, but was left hidden in some place in my memory, it is an amazing project!
- kyledrake 8y agoHad the pleasure of meeting @foone in Seattle a month ago. Definitely follow that twitter, this is -normal- levels of awesomeness.
- Causality1 8y agoA fascinating read though there were a couple of small mistakes. >Pilotwings came out a month after the SNES, not a year. >ROM as in a file copy of the contents of ROM chips is not technically short for "ROM dump" because, though it is a ROM dump, the usage of ROM to describe it does not originate with usage of the term ROM dump.
- krisoft 8y agoYou know, I think the crashing demo is more compeling game design wise. I watch it and have an itch to pull up a bit the nose and give a bit more throttle. That itch is the demo pulling me in, causing me to want to play. The perfect landing is meh, clearly the computer can do it, why would I bother picking up the controls? Interesting that the developers disagreed enough to roll a new chip, at what I guess was a considerable expense.
- xg15 8y ago(Spoiler) My understanding was that the "perfect" landing was first, using the old version of the chip. Then the new chip changed the physics calculations and the demo replay became a crash landing. So the "crash landing" cartridges are the newer revisions and I'd guess the motivation to change the ship was a simple "update this dependency to the newest version".
- aflag 8y agoIt's a bit different than that. The newer version here is physical. So they would stop making the older version at some point. Not like software that the old version is always available. They likely realised it was happening, but just didn't think fixing it was worth it.
- klodolph 8y agoTo fix it you would need to issue a new mask ROM, with all the associated tooling costs.
- xg15 8y agoGood point. I wonder if the devs of the game even consciously decided the change at all or if the DSP1 supplier at one point simply started shipping the version with the fix. Which, ironically, would be an early example of forced automatic updates messing things up.
- lifeisstillgood 8y ago>>> then you collect all three types of DSP chips, you carefully dump acid on them, and you visually extract the ROM data Tell me more !! How? Do a YouTube video on this ! Hell, Netflix will pay for a ten episode series on hardware hacking easy!
- Al-Khwarizmi 8y agoNo video of the crash landing, though?
- vultour 8y agoIt's the very first tweet?
- Al-Khwarizmi 8y agoOh, of course. I have become spoiled from years of graphic improvements in games, I was expecting a depiction of the plane being torn to pieces or an explosion to show that it crashed...
- laythea 8y agoI'm not a fan of this essay type thing being on twitter, split into lots of little tweets.
- antome 8y agoTwitter seems to be in this weird space where they have enough usability positives over other social media (pretty broadly accessible, doesn't pester you to log in, you can post NSFW content without it getting taken down) that I guess people just force themselves to use it, even if a blog post would be better formatted.
- acdha 8y agoI think it’s the combination of feeling easy to do (both UI & not feeling pressure to write a formal essay) and getting immediate feedback. For most people blogging is mostly solitary in comparison.
- jimbo1qaz 8y agoTwitter does pester you to log in when scrolling down someone's profile, I think. Maybe it was on mobile.
- seapunk 8y agoAlready mentioned here before: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1066547670477488128 https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1066547670477488128
- oconnor663 8y agoIt's like every time anyone writes anything about CockroachDB, the top comment has to be "yeah but the name tho..."
- lallysingh 8y agoThey should change the name! It's a terrible name and it's cost them an inestimable amount of users.
- dospunk 8y agoA lot of people are complaining about twitter as the delivery method for this kind of content. I actually really like it, having things broken up like this makes it much easier for me to digest because of my ADHD
- Nuzzerino 8y agoI have "ADHD" as well. Your brain is like a muscle, and when you actively avoid using it a certain way then it becomes harder to do things that way. The attention economy and the "ADHD" epidemic have a parasitic symbiotic relationship with one another. I'm sure you remember reading books as a kid, so you weren't born like this.
- sopooneo 8y agoThis hits on something I've wondered about for a long time. Since carts did not just include data, but also mappers and coprocessors, how do you write an emulator that can accurately play an arbitrary ROM dump? Does your emulator have to have knowledge of every single game, and what mappers and/or "helper" chips each had, and emulate just the ones appropriate for a given game?
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 8y agoYep. Exactly.
- kibwen 8y agoThey do, absurdly enough. See for example BSNES, https://byuu.org/ https://byuu.org/ , here's a quote from their most recent release notes: "If the coprocessor firmware is missing, bsnes will fallback on HLE where it is supported, which is everything other than SD Gundam GX and the two Hayazashi Nidan Morita Shougi games." See past HN submissions about the extreme lengths BSNES goes to in order to get this data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3675123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3675123 , "In order to extract these programs from most of the DSPs, we had to decap the chips, scan them in with an electron microscope, and 'tweak' the processors to allow us to dump their protected program ROMs."
- tenebrisalietum 8y agoFor example, The iNES format, for NES emulators, has a 16 byte header, not part of the original ROM, that identifies the mapper, screen mirroing if not controlled by the mapper, and whether or not battery backed RAM is included. NES mapper numbers were standardized among emulator authors. Look for "NES mapper list". Some very early games didn't use a mapper (that's what mapper 0 is).
- BearOso 8y agoSNES games do have an intrinsic header that describes the cartridge content. What’s missing has to be guessed through heuristics. bsnes has a file format for describing this stuff in detail, but it’s so far not been very popular because users like things to be self-contained. That brings up another interesting point. foone says the ROM data dumped would be identical, but that’s disingenuous. The DSP firmware is part of the cartridge, too, and it is clearly different. byuu has proposed catenating the DSP image to the base ROM for this reason. Of course, the Pilotwings case was unique, being the only game to ship with two different DSP firmwares.