2 ms·

Oh, man, using DEBUG to mess around with the system binaries was my JAM when I was 13, 14 years old. I would put new messages in, cheat at Prince of Persia on t

Oh, man, using DEBUG to mess around with the system binaries was my JAM when I was 13, 14 years old. I would put new messages in, cheat at Prince of Persia on the school's computers by patching the save file, all sorts of malarkey. I discovered that my computer's 80186 processor had onboard features that no other x86 processor had: among them, three onboard very high resolution timers. I used one of those timers and a very tight loop to toggle the speaker with a sort of PWM to make it play at different volumes. I didn't really know what I was doing, I should have timed the various instructions and adjusted the timer delay so I could tune the speaker to different frequencies. But I got within spitting distance of being able to play music with some degree of timbre and even polyphony on that thing, which it wasn't designed to do!

greenbit 4y ago
How ironic that these days there are many millions of computers chock full of nifty devices like that, that are dedicated to individual users, that are all buttoned up so tightly with multi-user protected operating systems that it's virtually impossible for a kid to discover the sense of power you get from banging directly on the metal. Sure, you can still get there, but the road is now very much longer and full of non obvious steps. With good old debug.exe, the curtain was right there for anyone to pull back.
- unnouinceput 4y ago
  You know, DOS is still there and you can bang directly in the metal inside a virtual machine. But nowadays you can do this even way better in Arduino/RaspberryPi, having even more hardware exposed. Sure, the road is a bit longer, but also the power rush you get from seeing your little nifty cobbled together wires that, once coupled with a serial->usb converter, your fiddling with switches will do on the screen, is very intoxicating.

greenbit 4y ago

How ironic that these days there are many millions of computers chock full of nifty devices like that, that are dedicated to individual users, that are all buttoned up so tightly with multi-user protected operating systems that it's virtually impossible for a kid to discover the sense of power you get from banging directly on the metal. Sure, you can still get there, but the road is now very much longer and full of non obvious steps. With good old debug.exe, the curtain was right there for anyone to pull back.

unnouinceput 4y ago
You know, DOS is still there and you can bang directly in the metal inside a virtual machine. But nowadays you can do this even way better in Arduino/RaspberryPi, having even more hardware exposed. Sure, the road is a bit longer, but also the power rush you get from seeing your little nifty cobbled together wires that, once coupled with a serial->usb converter, your fiddling with switches will do on the screen, is very intoxicating.