Hacker News Reader

AdmiralAsshaton PS5 Jailbreaks Are Escalating at an Unprecedented Pace

> I don't even know what the serial port was actually meant for.

The rarely-used Playstation Link cable, ostensibly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Link_Cable

Never used it myself, but it allowed a really weird first-person multiplayer mode in Bushido Blade:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-obFMn_u3U4

Truly we live in a golden period where any of the major console vendor's controllers can be reasonably well-supported on Steam and Linux. My own Gaming PC's main companion is a spare Switch Pro Controller that I took out of rotation due to a stick-drift issue but then repaired.

AdmiralAsshaton Pirating the Pirates

Unrelated, but in the same vein of "pirating the pirates": the modern "quality of life" improvements that are so often praised alongside modern videogame remakes/remasters of classic games are rather shamelessly cribbed from emulators.

1) "Save Anywhere": Emulator save states

2) 2x/4x/10x "fast forward" mode: Emulator frameskip. Most modern emulators have a "rewind" feature, too, but legit games tend not to use it since it can trivialize the difficulty.

3) Briefly turn on EXP/Money/No random encounters: Features from cheat engines, which technically precede emulation and go back to GameShark and Game Genie before it...but cheat engines are universally built-into emulators these days, making them easier to use. Turning on EXP multipliers to "skip the grind" is definitely an emulation-heavy thing for those going through old JRPGs.

4) "Randomizers" : Pulled from rom hacks.

AdmiralAsshaton PS5 Relapse Exploit

> Unfortunately holding the PS5 controller gives me crippling pain in my wrists and it also doesn't have any games I care about

Juice might not be worth the squeeze, but have you tried one of their Access controllers?

https://www.amazon.com/Access-Controller-PlayStation-5-Gamin...

AdmiralAsshaton F-Droid 2.0

I hope the new redesign makes the store easier to navigate on TVs. It's a nightmare trying to install/update apps on F-Droid on either my Nvidia Shield Pro or my Onn 4K TV using the tv remote. The cursor gets lost all the time and it's often impossible to see what option is currently in focus when you click Ok on the remote.

AdmiralAsshaton Grim Fandango Puzzle Document (1996) [pdf]

I'm glad I used a walkthrough when playing the game, because even after beating it I still have no idea how the hell the Chain puzzle worked.

AdmiralAsshaton Ogre Battle 64 Recompiled Project at 99.05%

Nice. Haven't played this since the N64. It was one of the best games of the system, and I think OB64 in particular gets overlooked next to Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics due to the lack of Matsuno's involvement. But it's head and shoulders better than the original Ogre Battle, and can stand toe-to-toe with Matsuno's best.

I'd love to play it again some day, since my first playthrough was without a guide and despite 60+ hours logged into the game, I ended up getting the worst ending thanks to the completely unexplained mechanic that your ending was determined by how many forts you "liberate" vs "conquer" (basically was your character of a higher or lower alignment than the fort when you captured it).

AdmiralAsshaton The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities

Do they blast Entombed albums while performing Swedish death cleaning?

AdmiralAsshaton Original Sony PlayStation 2 security chip 'broken wide open' after 26 years

What's the practical benefit of this? Will it allow us to reverse-engineer the BIOS so that PS2 emulators can ship with a working one rather than forcing end-users to "procure" a proprietary BIOS blob?

AdmiralAsshaton I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea

> and it's terrifying how violent they are compared to modern standards

Not really, we just got better at it. Combat in the Ancient Near East consisted of bludgeoning your opponent with maces, clubs, and other blunt instruments. It took awhile to kill someone. We seem to equate "violence" with the duration spent killing someone (as though "dragging it out" is worse), but the end result between the millennia is the same: person A kills person B. We can just do it now in seconds with a single well-placed bullet instead of multiple minutes of agonized bludgeoning.

AdmiralAsshaton "Project Dream" SNES Prototype Uploaded to Internet Archive

What's playable here is pretty much exactly what was shown in the Rare documentary video of the game from ten years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w72kj20YNA0&pp=ygUNcHJvamVjd...

It strongly suggests what we have is whatever Stamper has, and that's all there was (at least in its SNES incarnation). If you do download the prototype, you can "play through" it in about 10 minutes. There's literally just the four screens.

AdmiralAsshaton PlayStation cancels Kojima's PHYSINT, Xbox steps in

Surprised Valve didn't try to step in. There was a comment from a former Valve employee that they had tried to recruit Kojima for an earlier project (probably Death Stranding) but got outbid.

AdmiralAsshaton Coyote v. Acme (1990)

> Yes, it's like an seeing an issue of "Space Jam" from the original treatment

Here you go:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QeG-noRMPs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsQZ9_NPWww

AdmiralAsshaton South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones

"Millennials are killing diamond mines!"

AdmiralAsshaton Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

Mac Mini's were really nice HTPC candidates, too, before the AI boom. Like all things genuinely useful and affordable, they were snatched from the hands of normal consumers by a bunch of schmucks chasing the latest gold rush.

AdmiralAsshaton Kobo can run apps now

There's a contingent of enthusiasts who, once they find out a device runs Linux or can run Linux, seems determined to expose a terminal on it. I don't know why someone needs to SSH into their toaster, but damned if they're not gonna do it, just because they can.

Me personally, I just want a reliable toaster.

AdmiralAsshaton The Lost Treasure of Sid Meier's Pirates

"In a browser" is always an option:

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Sid_Meiers_Pirates_1987

https://archive.org/details/PiratesMacintosh

There are probably others, but Archive.org is misbehaving at the moment.

AdmiralAsshaton CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s

Did you know about the CIA's DECADES-LONG FUNDING of Coca-Cola? I have a hot tip from my good friend the soda machine technician that the CIA regularly funnels THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS a month into the pockets of BIG SODA when they restock their office kitchens and vending machines with Coca-Cola products!

This insidious relationship goes ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP, my friend!

AdmiralAsshaton A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

Didn't VCDs do the same thing? IIRC the Sega Saturn could play them.

AdmiralAsshaton Rings forged from meteorites may have been fashionable among ancient Greek elite

My engagement ring contains meteorite, supposedly from the Gibeon Meteorite, although the fact that a single meteorite is a component advertised in so many rings makes me somewhat suspicious as to the quantity or authenticity. But it looks pretty, anyway.

AdmiralAsshaton How does IKEA come up with names for its products?

Article is missing the urban legend about "Bite the wax tadpole"

AdmiralAsshaton Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

No Verizon support. :(

AdmiralAsshaton England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C

Introducing: Hepatitis C++

AdmiralAsshaton Squeak 6.1

The UI has been a huge impediment in my getting into Squeak development. Every couple years I decide I will try it again, and then see that very little has changed.

It's a shame. Smalltalk/Squeak/Pharo was supposed to be the future, but it feels like an IDE stuck in the 90's.

AdmiralAsshaton A Rant About “Technology” (2005)

By that construction, it seems like "hard sci-fi" would allow little to no creativity to push the envelope unless the author is also a theoretical physicist.

AdmiralAsshaton A Rant About “Technology” (2005)

Half of Star Trek would basically be "magic" by that rubric. I think she reasoned through a problem and conceived of a solution, even if she didn't have the implementation details figured out.

AdmiralAsshaton A Rant About “Technology” (2005)

To wit, LeGuin is the one who originally coined the term "ansible," which is about as hard sci-fi as you can get.

AdmiralAsshaton Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

Of course, if Rebecca is to be believed (per the above interview)...that's not at all why they cancelled it. They cancelled it because Valve was pissed off with Apple for lying to them about the size of their userbase, and then unilaterally decreed henceforth that no Valve game would ever see a release on an Apple platform.

AdmiralAsshaton Worse on Purpose

I sure wasn't expecting to see multi-level-marketing company Cutco on the list of "Approved" vendors. I guess it depends on which moral failing you're monitoring.