Hacker News: Dwedit

New comment by Dwedit in "Detecting DOSBox from Within the Box"

Dwedit — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:55:24 +0000

The other way to detect DosBox is a one line Qbasic program PRINT VAL("5").

If it's a 64-bit build made using Visual Studio, you get 4.99999999999. Visual Studio doesn't support legacy 80-bit floating point math for that target. Visual Studio also does not support inline assembly to let you make use of the legacy 80-bit floating point instructions.

But if you set the CPU core to "Dynamic", then you get the proper value of "5". Or if you use the MingW builds, those also support 80-bit floating point math and give the correct value of "5".

It is quite embarrassing to ship a CPU emulator with broken floating point math as the default.

New comment by Dwedit in "Ban the sale of precise geolocation"

Dwedit — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:57:07 +0000

Contractual agreement? Nobody reads things like EULAs or terms of service. It's probably in there already.

New comment by Dwedit in "US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification"

Dwedit — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 04:58:18 +0000

People lend phones or computers to kids. The age associated with the user account means absolutely nothing.

New comment by Dwedit in "RedSun: System user access on Win 11/10 and Server with the April 2026 Update"

Dwedit — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:48:23 +0000

Any way to disable the entire cloud tag system?

New comment by Dwedit in "The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew"

Dwedit — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 23:30:26 +0000

A video posted by McDonalds Canada reveals how they stage the burgers for photographing them. They shift each layer backwards (bun, meat, etc) so that the ingredients of the layer are more visible when photographed. The top bun ends up being a few inches backward compared to the bottom bun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSd0keSj2W8

New comment by Dwedit in "Direct Win32 API, Weird-Shaped Windows, and Why They Mostly Disappeared"

Dwedit — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:47:02 +0000

You summon Wesley Willis of course (rip).

New comment by Dwedit in "Direct Win32 API, Weird-Shaped Windows, and Why They Mostly Disappeared"

Dwedit — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:46:16 +0000

"GetMessage" can do a lot of things you don't expect it to do. Ever used a global keyboard hook? Your keyboard handler code is called because "GetMessage" is calling other functions to have it get handled.

New comment by Dwedit in "Direct Win32 API, weird-shaped windows, and why they mostly disappeared"

Dwedit — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:42:06 +0000

You can modify this stuff if you go deep enough and are willing to detour the native Win32 API functions. Some things implemented in User32.dll don't make the appropriate API calls back to other User32.dll functions, and you need to detour Win32U.dll instead.

New comment by Dwedit in "Direct Win32 API, weird-shaped windows, and why they mostly disappeared"

Dwedit — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:38:11 +0000

Winforms is built on top of Win32, and you can use your own Win32 code alongside it, even overriding how a control behaves.

New comment by Dwedit in "Direct Win32 API, weird-shaped windows, and why they mostly disappeared"

Dwedit — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:34:37 +0000

Even a minimal Hello World program (1.5KB executable) takes 340K of active private working set, and 552K of commit size. Windows just don't allow programs to use any less memory than that. You're bound by what the system libraries allocate (either statically or dynamically).

Once you create a window, even if you haven't drawn that window, your minimum is now around 500KB.

New comment by Dwedit in "Introduction to Nintendo DS Programming"

Dwedit — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:05:56 +0000

ARMv7 and ARM7 look very similar, but ARM7 is ARMv3, and ARM9 is ARMv4. Similar names are very misleading here.

New comment by Dwedit in "PicoZ80 – Drop-In Z80 Replacement"

Dwedit — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:18:08 +0000

The one thing that makes a modern computer faster than an 80s computer is cache. Without cache, your computer has to go to the memory bus to fetch every instruction and memory read or write, and your system will wait to get the bytes back before it takes any action. You end up at the performance level of an 80s computer.

So you replace the CPU with a faster one with built-in cache. CPU ends up with its own private copy of the RAM and ROM sitting in its cache. But that's not the end.

Computers have a memory map, memory bank switching, memory-mapped IO, and other things to consider. The CPU with its cache has to be kept in sync with the actual memory map of the system. Both the CPU and any memory mapping hardware need to be kept in sync with each other. Memory-mapped IO reads and writes need to go to the actual memory bus at native bus speed.

Then you're left with the issue of other devices that need to access the RAM. This requires cache flushing for writes, and cache invalidation for reads.

New comment by Dwedit in "Adobe modifies hosts file to detect whether Creative Cloud is installed"

Dwedit — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:11:56 +0000

Browsers could still do something about mixed Internet and LAN/Localhost requests by IP address regardless of the domain name.

New comment by Dwedit in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

Dwedit — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:07:52 +0000

Every time I tried following alone with the winelib/winemaker documentation, I always ended up with an ELF that had to be invoked using "wine" to run. Nothing that could self-load any of the wine dependencies.

New comment by Dwedit in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

Dwedit — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 05:47:50 +0000

WinForms is a layer built on top of raw Win32. So it's not portable.

Even though Wine exists, Win32 calls can only be made from Win32 programs, not native Linux programs. So a WinForms app using the latest dotnet would need to run the Windows version of dotnet under Wine, and not use the Linux version of dotnet.

New comment by Dwedit in "The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes"

Dwedit — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 05:33:20 +0000

X264 supports a lossless mode without chroma subsampling, which produces very good compression for raw emulator captures of retro game footage. It is much better than other codecs like HuffYuv, etc.

But for some reason, Firefox refuses to play back those kinds of files.

New comment by Dwedit in "SPF/PC v4 for MS-DOS, FreeDOS, x86"

Dwedit — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:34:52 +0000

Github lets you disable the issue tracker, seems like the thing to do here if a project is serious about "not looking at tickets".

New comment by Dwedit in "Microsoft to force updates to Windows 11 25H2 for PCs with older OS versions"

Dwedit — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:39:47 +0000

It seems like WUB (windows update blocker) will still prevent an update?

New comment by Dwedit in "How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?"

Dwedit — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:32:23 +0000

I have personally nullified one of those, namely the Copilot Key. It took a low level keyboard hook, and blocking a specific sequence of keys, then injecting the right ctrl key back.

New comment by Dwedit in "Show HN: 1-Bit Bonsai, the First Commercially Viable 1-Bit LLMs"

Dwedit — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 05:48:10 +0000

Presumably because a new account, and an offtopic post about AI. Then you look at the post history.