Author Archives: pappp

Donkey Kong Country 2 and open bus

Source: OSNews

Article note: Neat! It's a lovely, engaging, easily understood "Memory vs. Immediate" example, "Programming is like writing, where one punctuation mark out of place on page 126 renders the whole thing nonsense" story, AND an "Undefined behavior be wild" story, wrapped into one. I might use this as an example with my embedded class in the future.

Apparently, Donkey Kong Country 2 has runs into a bug in the old SNES emulator ZSNES, where one of the barrels that you’re supposed to be able to precisely control the spinning direction of ends up spinning forever.

This bug is caused by ZSNES not emulating open bus behavior. I believe this was originally discovered by Anomie roughly two decades ago, who subsequently fixed the same bug in Snes9x. This original fix hardcoded the specific addresses to return the values that the game depends on rather than properly emulating open bus, but it fixed DKC2 and probably didn’t break anything else. The bug was never fixed in ZSNES, which is now a long abandoned project (last release in 2007).

Purely out of curiosity, I wanted to dig into this a little more to figure out what exactly in the game code causes these barrels to spin forever in an emulator that doesn’t emulate open bus behavior.

↫ jsgroth

Just in case you’ve always wanted to know.

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Wayback: experimental layer to run X desktop environments on Wayland

Source: OSNews

Article note: Interesting, it's not just "of course you can do that with rootful xwyaland", this project is aiming to be _just_ enough Wayland compositor and plumbing to launch a full screen rootful xwayland instance, so you can just use xwayland as your X server for running a whole X11-based environment, with all the resultant properties like like working input plumbing (at the cost of no isolation), and forwarding, and a whole variety of niche WMs because X is older and the amount of bullshit to make a useful WM is much lower than a useful compositor. It's a good way to streamline the graphics code paths in a system and ensure long-term functionality of existing codebases.

With X.org being in maintenance mode, with the process of replacing it with Wayland accelerating pretty quickly now, a lot of projects using X.org are looking for ways to prepare for the future. Alpine Linux, a distribution focused on musl, BusyBox, and OpenRC, also wants to reduce its maintenance burden for X11 applications, and so Alpine Linux maintainer Ariadne Conill has come up with something interesting.

Wayback is an experimental X compatibility layer which allows for running full X desktop environments using Wayland components. It is essentially a stub compositor which provides just enough Wayland capabilities to host a rootful Xwayland server.

It is intended to eventually replace the classic X.org server in Alpine, thus reducing maintenance burden of X applications in Alpine, but a lot of work needs to be done first.

↫ Wayback GitHub page

It’s nowhere near done and most likely contains massive amounts of bugs and issues, but the seed has been planted. Wayback will make it possible to keep running X11-based desktop environments even in a full-Wayland environment. This may be necessary in case you need a specific feature not yet available in the Wayland version of your desktop environment, or if your desktop environment of choice simply isn’t going to move to Wayland at all (due to lack of maintainers or whatever).

It’ll also be a boon for retrocomputing, especially as over the coming years and decades unmaintained X11 desktop environments become become ever harder to keep running on modern Linux distributions. While X.org as it exists today certainly isn’t going anywhere any time soon, it will, eventually, stop working properly on Linux distributions who don’t ship it by default anymore, and it’s awesome to already have the beginnings of a project to address this problem.

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“I want a good parallel computer”

Source: OSNews

Article note: Every academic CompE type person says some variation of "I want a bunch of simple, predictable cores!", but (IMO) the problem is always that so few people can effectively program in an environment with general-purpose concurrency, and memory management in dynamic environments (always, but especially in the face of concurrency) is so impossibly hard, that big unpredictable pipelined out-of-order basically-a-JIT-to-its-internal-instruction-set cores and bolted on constrained SIMD engines keep winning in practice.

The GPU in your computer is about 10 to 100 times more powerful than the CPU, depending on workload. For real-time graphics rendering and machine learning, you are enjoying that power, and doing those workloads on a CPU is not viable. Why aren’t we exploiting that power for other workloads? What prevents a GPU from being a more general purpose computer?

↫ Raph Levien

Fascinating thoughts on parallel computation, including some mentions of earlier projects like Intel’s Larabee or the Connection Machine with 64k processors the ’80s, as well as a defense of the PlayStation 3’s Cell architecture.

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Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook


The only books I buy new anymore are beautiful things that appeal to my niche interests, which might become unavailable because they are niche… so my pre-ordered copy of Lori Emerson’s new book Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook arrived today.

Lori Emerson is one of the few people really prominently writing seriously in a media studies/anthropological sort of way about the history of technology, and I constantly assert that there isn’t enough of that, so I’m excited to see a win.

I found her via the press for her first book, Reading Writing Interfaces, which is fabulous and thought provoking (and I only have a handful of quibbles with it, mostly around promulgating some of Apple’s dubious self-centering history that they seeded to writers and journalists in the 90s, even where she clearly knows better) and have followed her online posts as she prepared this one – We even interacted online once or twice in those; I’m acknowledged in her piece The Net Has Never Been Neutral that didn’t end up in the book because of a conversation we had online about how different parts of the audience would understand the world “Neutral” in subtly and problematically different ways when she posted an earlier version.

At a skim, Other Networks is much less densely academic and analytical than Reading Writing Interfaces; it really is a sourcebook of curated examples of technologies and instances of those technologies, with the necessary breadcrumbs to set up the interesting properties and comparisons with others. I’m a little disappointed that some of the deep musings about other ways the thing that is the Internet could have been largely didn’t make it in to the book, but, from an editorial view, they are different content for a different audience than what it ended up being.


It is also beautiful; the binding and the typesetting and the illustrations, right down to this lovely little foiled glyph on the back cover. My copy is sitting next to Marcin Wichary’s Shift Happens, which is a benchmark for beautiful books, and it looks good.

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Apple Just Patented an Image Sensor with 20 Stops of Dynamic Range

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Neat. It's leaning into the design space where you get a small sensel (For fill factor and resolution), and stacked dies mean you can pack quite a bit of readout circuity behind the photsensitive layer. Their sensel is basically a photodiode pumping a pair of (MOS) capacitors in vague-power-of-10 sizes attached, with a more sophisticated readout circuit that will separately read the charge on the diode junction capacitance and the caps to get three simultaneous ranges out of one sensel, for post-exposure auto-ranging. A little noise modeling on top and it's a good idea. We've got an undergrad in the lab I'm working in this summer working on a hand-made 4x4 LED array as a sensor to validate a different readout regime, but the same basic LED leakage charging the junction capacitance + noise model sensing mechanism.
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Microsoft is moving antivirus providers out of the Windows kernel

Source: OSNews

Article note: Good. Limiting vendor access to kernel mode through narrow APIs is a general good, shifty third-party "antivirus" or "anticheat" should be treated like the borderline-malware it is, but the broader market should be consulted on what kind of access is actually needed for effective security software on managed endpoints.

It’s been nearly a year since a faulty CrowdStrike update took down 8.5 million Windows-based machines around the world, and Microsoft wants to ensure such a problem never happens again. After holding a summit with security vendors last year, Microsoft is poised to release a private preview of Windows changes that will move antivirus (AV) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) apps out of the Windows kernel.

↫ Tom Warren at The Verge

After the CrowdStrike incident, one of the first things Microsoft hinted as was moving antivirus and EDR applications out of the kernel, building an entirely new framework for these applications instead. The company has been working together with several large security vendors on these new frameworks and APIs, and it’s now finally ready to show off this new work to the outside world. Instead of designing the new frameworks and APIs in-house and just dumping them on the security vendors, Microsoft requested the security vendors send them detailed documentation on how they want the new frameworks and APIs to work.

This first preview of the new implementation will be private, and will allow security vendors to request changes and additional features. Microsoft states it will take a few iterations before it’s ready for general availability, and on top of that, security software is only the first focus of this new effort. It turns out Microsoft wants to move more stuff out of the kernel, with anti-cheat software – more accurately described as rootkits, like Riot’s Vanguard – being an obvious next target.

Perhaps this effort could have some beneficial side effects for gaming on Linux, which you should be doing anyway if you want better performance, because Windows games seem to perform better on Linux than they do on Windows.

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MinisForum UM870 Slim

I picked up a little MinisForum UM870 Slim in a 32GB/1TB configuration for about $463 on sale (from nominal $580 sticker price) a few weeks ago, just to have a decent piece of fixed hardware on my desk at home. I’d recommend these things to a large swath of the desktop market, with a few model-specific caveats. Details below.

A Minisforum UM870Slim held in-hand to show size.
Easily in the 1L ultra small form factor class, 130×126.5×50.4mm is about 0.8L
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Snow – Classic Macintosh emulator

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Neat! Always good to see motion around platform emulation. BasiliskII is HLE (and has the tradeoff of inaccuracies and super cool tricks as a result), MAME and qemu-system-m68k are both a little ugly to use - though the latter has become quite capable in recent years, it's good enough to mostly run A/UX 3.x, and the only other success at that was Shoebill, which is both long abandoned and was rather special-purpose. This is more similar to MiniVMac, but already has Mac II/'020 support (but no higher, so it can't get in the A/UX game yet) and is a little more conventionally structured.
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Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: This is pretty hilarious, Wintendo machines have been one of the only really unassailable strongholds for Microsoft. The actual benchmarks _are_ a narrow case (SteamOS on AMD gaming handhelds), and the AMD thing is important because one of the only pieces of software they haven't botched in recent years is their Vulkan driver stack, but ... SteamOS isn't very special among Linux distros, and I suspect it will mostly generalize to anything but Nviaida who are too busy running AI grifts to care. Windows 11, from UI to performance, really is creaking under the weight of all the upselling roach motel crapware.

Nearly a decade ago, Ars testing found that Valve's "Steam Machines"-era version of SteamOS performed significantly worse than Windows when SteamOS's Linux game ports were tested on the same hardware as their Windows counterparts. Today, though, Ars testing on the Lenovo Legion Go S finds recent games generally run at higher frame rates on SteamOS 3.7 than on Windows 11. The performance advantage is yet another way that Valve's upstart OS is differentiating itself from the "default" Windows installation used by most PC gamers for decades now.

While users have been able to install Windows on the Steam Deck since its 2022 launch, Valve doesn't offer official "Windows on Deck" support for this alternative hardware use case. Lenovo's Legion Go S, on the other hand, is the first gaming portable explicitly designed to work with either Windows 11 (in hardware first released in January) or SteamOS (in hardware first released in May, alongside a new version of SteamOS designed for non-Valve AMD hardware).

To test the performance impact of this operating system choice, we started with the SteamOS version of the Legion Go S (provided by Lenovo) and tested five high-end 3D games released in the last five years using built-in benchmarking tools and two different graphics/resolution tiers. We then installed Windows 11 on the handheld, downloaded updated drivers from Lenovo's support site, and re-ran the benchmarks on the same games downloaded through Steam for Windows.

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Microsoft extends free Windows 10 security updates into 2026, with strings attached

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Microsoft gettin' visibly nervous about "Slow Adoption" (people not wanting their new shit) AND finding a new way to pressure users on the existing platform into the panopticon roach motel.

Last fall, Microsoft announced that individuals who wanted to keep using Windows 10 past its official end-of-support date could do so by opting into the company's Extended Security Update (ESU) program at a cost of $30 per PC. That payment would get users a single year of additional security updates. Today, less than four months before that October 14, 2025, cutoff, Microsoft is announcing additional options for people who can't or don't want to pay that fee.

Individuals who want to pay $30 for the additional year of updates will still be able to do so. But Microsoft will also extend a year of additional Windows 10 security updates to any users who opt into Windows Backup, a relatively recent Windows 10 and Windows 11 app that backs up some settings and files using a Microsoft account. Users can also opt into ESU updates by spending 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, which are handed out for everything from making purchases with your Microsoft account to doing Bing searches.

These offers don't formally extend the end-of-support date for Windows 10. But for users who don't want to move to Windows 11 or who can't do so because their PC doesn't meet the requirements, they do effectively offer an additional year of free updates for the OS that's still installed on a slim majority of the world’s Windows PCs, according to Statcounter data.

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