bbayles

Really cool! I'll play with this to see if I can come up with some missing hashes for Tony Hawk 3.

If you feel like a challenge, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 has some hashes with unknown inputs. The function is the same as the one in the article, and one target is 1eca8e89ad2dc1d6.

Good point - the dictionary attack produces some permutations that are too long, but it doesn't matter because you get the effect as soon as the final character of the correct code is entered.

Yeah, for sure. It's as expensive to generate the permutations as it is to do the hashing in this case!

I knew some from school, but stepping through a debugger with a video game that I remembered from childhood was a better education on computer engineering than anything I got in class.

Thanks! I didn't clock that - should have looked at the decrypted values!

A friend of mine explained that there are overlapping phobias of water and deep dark spaces that this game triggers; he said it's unbearable to play the later levels.

I've poked around a bit with that game! The main trick is to import the memory snapshot (various ways of dumping it to a file; people like Cheat Engine for this) into Ghidra. Ghidra can analyze t…

The programmers for this game were in Budapest, so this is a good guess!

It really is a game with a strange mix of aesthetics. Blue skies and bright colors in the early levels; suspense and dread and supernatural stuff in the later levels. Another Ed Annunziata game called…

Yeah, exactly! I took a couple memory snapshots of the name "AAA" and then threw out all of the addresses that had values that didn't match the first snapshot. Then I changed it to &quo…

I've used Geany for 10+ years on Linux and Mac. Very similar to Notepad++!

I've been having some fun lately reverse engineering the "password" systems that some console games used prior to memory cards and backup RAM. Some are very straightforward - just an en…

How about a service that lets bruteforcers "in" after some number of failed attempts, but what they get is just a fake command prompt that accepts all of their commands? I'm sure hacker…

The story you're thinking of is about Leonhard Euler, though it may not have actually happened (see Wikipedia on Euler).

What did they do prior to 1984?

I had a coworker who could really Go Fast in Excel, and by watching him, learned enough tricks to be able to impress onlookers by flying through computations with keyboard shortcuts. From my perspecti…

It's also possible that the firm is being trolled by the "threat actor."

The screenshots of the chat logs are really something. This firm claims to be in communication with the actual criminal, and the actual criminal says that using their firm would have helped prevent th…

I love doing this kind of stuff - it's endlessly engrossing to me. Lately I've been trying to find previously undiscovered cheat codes in 1990s console games - there are lots that never made…

There's a Saturn game called Thunderhawk II that has a password system. Part of it includes XORing one of the buffers with the string "NOSEY GIT", which I took to mean they were chidi…

There are lots of cool things like this to discover in Sega Saturn games, in large part because people are intimidated by the notoriously difficult SH-2 assembly language. However, the Saturn surprisi…

The headline makes me raise my eyebrows. We're deriving "mad" from this anodyne statement? > The NOI’s undue focus on affordability—or pricing—is particularly inappropriate. The link…

I've been writing up my findings here: https://32bits.substack.com/ So far I've focused on the Sega Saturn because it is notorious for having a difficult-to-understand assem…

I wanted to learn how to use Ghidra for reverse engineering binaries. The thing that allowed me to really improve with it was using it to analyze old video games that I played as a kid in the 1990s. F…

I have mixed feelings about how "welcoming" PSF is for new contributors. On the one hand, I've managed to get a number of enhancements into CPython. On the other hand, I've fixed s…

For a contrary perspective, this wasn't my experience with being acquired by Cisco. I had my issues with the process, but I felt well-treated throughout and was never lied to.