10 ms·
Does this 8088 code in the Leisure Suit Larry 2 game do anything?
- b800h 3y agoNo-one in the comments there seems to have twigged that OBEAh is simultaneously a hex address and a word for JuJu, magic. Which I suppose is appropriate in the context of a tribal initiation?
- shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago"Someone" pointed that out about the same time as your comment here. Also, it is by coincidence as seen in the COMMAND.COM disassembly which would be the correct answer.
- xhkkffbf 3y agoWhile I don't know if this is really true, but there was a time when chips like the 8080 ran at a speed that was close to AM frequencies. Programmers figured out that certain patterns produced sounds on their radio. So they would insert garbage code that accessed the address bus at the right speeds. Perhaps this is something along those lines?
- westmeal 3y agoI have an old thinkpad x200 that I can hear operating over an AM radio close enough to the laptop but I have a feeling I'm hearing something else besides the CPU because the CPU would run too fast... right?
- duskwuff 3y agoI think you've misinterpreted the question pretty wildly. The code in question is in the game as text displayed on screen, not as part of the executable. Besides, IBM PC-compatible systems already had a reliable way of making basic sounds - the PC speaker. There was no need for the techniques you're describing on that platform.
- notfish 3y agoI think you’ve misunderstood the personality of hackers if you think they would make chips play sounds via radio because it was useful
- colechristensen 3y agoI saw demos of this at either blackhat or defcon, various methods to exfiltrate data by bitbanging pins, running garbage code, or otherwise triggering hardware or peripherals to generate unintended radio signals to be picked up at a distance. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of old games doing this for fun too.
- fragmede 3y agoVan eck phreaking is some crazy stuff!
- gerdesj 3y agoWhere in the article does it say "the code in question ... is displayed on screen"? I've read it a few times (half-heartedly) and then just to be sure (quite a few glasses of wine consumed already) I did a search for the word "screen" - nope, but not exactly conclusive. There are several theories espoused but one comment is: "In a brief email conversation with Al Lowe ... he probably used the COMMAND.COM file as the basis for this code ..." Your assertion about "reliable way of making basic sounds" is sort of true, if you ignore the shonky hardware that used to and get shipped as a "speaker". It's better nowadays and largely an anachronism. Back in the day you'd wedge a Soundblaster into an ISA slot along with some reasonable speakers or really good headphones and job done. Your parent may be thinking of the silly games that used to be played with big old Winchester discs on big IDM gear and the like.
- jerf 3y ago"Where in the article does it say "the code in question ... is displayed on screen"?" Nowhere. It is shown in the animation posted in the article, which you may have not noticed was animated if your eyes jumped over it quickly enough.
- dtgriscom 3y agoJust last week I spent a few hours using an AM radio to better understand what a locked-up i.MX7 processor was doing. (Unsuccessfully, but it was fun trying.)
- SomeoneFromCA 3y agoYou may try FM too. I used this technique with AVRs. It was midly useful, as reading from eeprom produced distinct sound.
- titzer 3y agoIn college I had a PC with a 100Mhz bus. One day I was defragging the hard disk--as one did in those days--and by chance had the PC case cover off and also the FM radio on. As I swept past 100Mhz I picked up the unmistakable KKSSHH CHKS CHKS CHKS coming from the data going over the bus. For a minute or two I thought the NSA bugged me.
- anthk 3y agoTry compiling and running tempest for Eliza if you have a nearby linux/bsd machine.
- mjevans 3y agoWow... that explains 90mhz and 133mhz chips as targets and bases for front side busses.
- WalterBright 3y ago> in college At Caltech some students would see how bright an LED could get if you immersed it in a liquid nitrogen bath. There was always something fun going on.
- sedatk 3y agoSomebody in the answers already figured out that the code belonged to MS-DOS 3.30 COMMAND.COM as previously attested by Al Lowe. https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/29580/3986 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/29580/3986
- epcoa 3y agoNot just "somebody", the original questioner posted that answer. Someone suggested they auto accept and they declined as they felt the answer they accepted answered their original question better (what it does, not where it is from). So there is no unfairness here. Put your pitch forks down.
- jojobas 3y agoYet the top answer is "this is gibberish". Go figure.
- spurgu 3y agoWell the top answer was written 3 days ago, the correct one 3 hours ago. Give it some time.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tylersmith 3y agoIt was just as confidently incorrect then as it is now.
- bombcar 3y ago> Comments have been moved to chat; please do not continue the discussion here. Before posting a comment below this one, please review the purposes of comments. Comments that do not request clarification or suggest improvements usually belong as an answer, on Retrocomputing Meta, or in Retrocomputing Chat. Comments continuing discussion may be removed. And this is how useful sites die.
- myself248 3y agoStackexchange's karma policy has effectively kept this 39-year veteran of computing from contributing so much as a word. I'm okay jumping through a hoop or two to prove I'm not a bot, but I never figured out how to earn enough points to comment without being able to comment. This is how useful sites die.
- duskwuff 3y ago> I never figured out how to earn enough points to comment By posting questions or answers, especially ones which get upvoted. Comments are, intentionally, treated as lower value by the site. They're intended for discussing and correcting issues which may exist with a question or answer, not for revealing new information.
- cellularmitosis 3y agoI'll echo OP's frustration / lament. I have domain expertise in a specific platform, and it is pretty common that I'll see an answer which could use some clarification or additional detail about edge cases to consider. However, 1) I never ask questions on SO, and 2) I don't have time to wade through unanswered questions. As a result, though I would like to give them free labor by adding useful comments, I will never be able to. The point is that SO is missing out here.
- o11c 3y agoIf you feel you can improve an answer, you can always just add your own answer. That should quickly give you enough to comment.
- esafak 3y agoI love that games used to have jokes like this, and that someone was able to ask this question three decades later and get an answer from the author. I'm only sad I didn't get this far in the game!
- malkia 3y agoFrom Ralphs Interrupt List, INT 21H with AH=4D -> https://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/rbinter/id/88/29.html https://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/rbinter/id/88/29.html INT 21 - DOS 2+ - GET RETURN CODE (ERRORLEVEL) more in the link above. That took me like 30+ years ago back ;)
- pwdisswordfishc 3y agoIt’s mentioned in one of the answers. With a much better-formatted RBIL edition linked.
- malkia 3y agoShould I be concerned?
- lordnacho 3y agoA bit like how Lorem Ipsum looks like Latin if you didn't learn any in school.
- peterfirefly 3y agoIt's corrupted Latin. It's mostly taken from a book by Cicero.
- GTP 3y agoWas Eunuchs, an OS that runs only on 8088 CPUs, a joking reference to Linux?
- ThrowawayR2 3y agoLSL2 was released in 1988. The first Linux kernel release was in 1991 and required an 80386 or later.
- fasa99 3y agoSo LSL2 came out in 1988, Linux in 1991, so definitely NOT a reference to Linux. However both the game and Linux are a reference to Unix (Bell Labs, released in 1970s). The LSL2 developers clearly knew about Unix. And the play on word "Eunuchs / Unix" is a reversal of the pun of the original Unix i.e. the authors of Unix were themselves making a pun on the word "Eunuchs". Here, what Unix was "castrating" was an even earlier (1960s?) operating system called Multics developed by Ken Thompson, who got frustrated by all the bloat and complexity, so sought to castrate down the complexity by writing the now famous Unix, whose paradigm spread far and wide and was re-implemented in Linux.
- dhosek 3y agoUm, not sure if you’re joking or just young, but you have heard of this thing called Unix, right?
- GTP 3y agoYes, I know about it, it's just that Linux come first to mind due to all the early discussions about it being Torvalds' toy project. Plus I assumed Unix supported also other architectures, given how much variety there was in the early days.
- dhosek 3y agoLeisure Suit Larry predates Linux by quite a bit (as I recall the first 8-bit versions of the game came out in the early 80s). As for Unix, in the olden days there were a lot of Unix variations (so there was a tendency to refer to ix as a generic term for all the variations) running on any platform that was at least 16-bit (I don’t think* there were ever any 8-bit Unix variations, but I could be wrong).