Hacker News: IronBacon

New comment by IronBacon in "Cheating at Tetris"

IronBacon — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 14:47:11 +0000

TGM, the first one, is my one time sink, I started to play first on Mame until I got an original Capcom ZN2 PCB.

Right now you can get an official TGM and TGM2:TA port on Sony PS4 (PS5 too?) and Switch for less that 10 dollars each. For TGM3 there's no port in sight, FWIK. In my opinion TGM2:TA is a better game that TGM but before tackling it I want to become GM on the first. According to expert players the second is increasingly more difficult, for example stricter time limits and conditions to meet, faster spawning and the infamous credit roll...

Last year TGM4 was released on Steam, but I don't like at all the new ranking system, also vs play doesn't have items.

Not really relevant to the article, but I wanted to give a shout out to my all time favorite pass time... ^__^;

P.S. Some random modder a few years created a patch for the original TGM arcade ROMs to run on a Playstation. Other than the Qsound, more RAM and some CATs used for protection, the ZN2 was basically a Playstation without an optical reader.

New comment by IronBacon in "NeoGeo AES+: SNK announces reissue of retro console without emulation"

IronBacon — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 19:37:49 +0000

One can buy right now a MISTerFPGA from aliexpress for around €150 and that can emulate both MVS and AES. On this side of the pond, a VGA to SCART cable is all that's required to connect it to a CRT TV.

If instead one want the real HW, a working MVS PCB can be found for less that €100. A JAMMA cabinet would be the perfect place to use it, but with a supergun a CRT TV can give the same results. Cheap superguns can be found or built for around €30, fancy models can cost between €200 to €300 tho.

The carts aren't cheap tho, specially if original. I've only a battered "Puzzle Bobble" cart, it's a really fun game in PvP, but probably not the more iconic NeoGeo title.

New comment by IronBacon in "I ported Linux to the PS5 and turned it into a Steam Machine"

IronBacon — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:41:27 +0000

According to some hearsay, there is allegedly at least another one unpatched hypervisor exploit in recent firmware. Considering the OP's track record, I'm not surprised he's sitting on a full-chain jailbreak.

Porting the Linux kernel to the PS5 is also an impressive flex, quite funny thinking that ten years ago, in 2016, fail0verflow did the same for the PS4...

New comment by IronBacon in "I ported Linux to the PS5 and turned it into a Steam Machine"

IronBacon — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 17:29:08 +0000

I don't know if it's related, but a few days ago I've read about an update about the mast1c0re exploit that permits to run native code (userland) on latest PS5 FW without a kernel exploit:

https://xcancel.com/CTurtE/status/2029321988397727776

New comment by IronBacon in "The Performance Revolution in JavaScript Tooling"

IronBacon — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 08:50:12 +0000

On a related note (but with Python), I recently tried uv instead of pip and was impressed by both its speed and dependency resolution. I was attempting to upgrade an internal project from Python 3.9, and pip was frustratingly slow, sometimes it would just get stuck with no output and no errors...

New comment by IronBacon in "Europe's crusade against air conditioning is insane"

IronBacon — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 18:44:12 +0000

I would need a sweater with 20C...

New comment by IronBacon in "Emacs as your video-trimming tool"

IronBacon — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 09:12:22 +0000

In my opinion Dired is the best way to rename files bar none (wdired-mode)...

New comment by IronBacon in "9front "clause 15 common elements of maus and star type" released"

IronBacon — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 07:59:54 +0000

A fork of Plan9 OS? https://fqa.9front.org/fqa0.html#0.1

New comment by IronBacon in "Burning and Playing PS2 Games Without a Modded Console"

IronBacon — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 07:34:07 +0000

The details are explained on the Cturt blog mentioned in another post, the original researcher, this one seems a GUI to simplify the process of patching ISO.

About your questions, I would guess transforming PS2 CD title to PS2 DVD first could work.

For PS1 titles, with a different exploit (mechapwn) you could boot them, but read the fine prints as it basically convert a consumer PS2 to a devkit/testkit (DEX?)...

New comment by IronBacon in "Burning and Playing PS2 Games Without a Modded Console"

IronBacon — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 07:15:56 +0000

Also from USB, unfortunately it's only USB 1.1 so titles with FMV sequence tend to stutter, so for slim models the network SMB share it's preferred...

About PS1 titles, there is a Sony PS1 emulator for PS2 called POPS that you can use with OPL but from what I read it has not a wide compatibility and it's not officially distributed by Sony, the other option is to use mechapwn to boot PS1 CDs, but it doesn't work on the early PS2 models according to this: https://github.com/MechaResearch/MechaPwn?tab=readme-ov-file...

New comment by IronBacon in "Daily Usenet Feed Size Hits 300TB"

IronBacon — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 01:14:22 +0000

Unfortunately Mullvad and the majority of VPN providers don't offer port-forwarding anymore, last year when I checked only a couple, maybe three remained...

Having wrote that, another option, under Linux with network namespaces and Wireguard it's possible to have a pretty fail proof VPN...

New comment by IronBacon in "The quest to decode the Mandelbrot set"

IronBacon — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 20:06:50 +0000

If I'm not confusing it with something else, I seem to recall that when zooming on the set the calculation was nearly instantaneous. As you said, good times! ^__^

I still have that A500 but who knows where I put those floppies, I'm tempted to turn it on but I'm scared the PSU will blow itself...

New comment by IronBacon in "The quest to decode the Mandelbrot set"

IronBacon — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 17:15:04 +0000

I remember as a teen I did mine in 68000 assembly on a Commodore Amiga to get it reasonable fast considering it was running on a 16 MHz CPU — i would say a few seconds to draw the canonical image — but IIRC it reached pretty fast the limit of math precision.

At that time I didn't know what was a complex number, but was fascinated by the whole concept of fractals and how complex structures could be created with a relative simple program.

New comment by IronBacon in "Tell HN: Reddit Has Disabled i.reddit.com"

IronBacon — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 18:00:33 +0000

On Android I have installed RedReader, don't recall if it's in the Android store or from the F-Droid one. Until they kill their API...

New comment by IronBacon in "Single Board Computers Benchmarks"

IronBacon — Sun, 23 Oct 2022 16:38:44 +0000

I hear you.

There's a page on the FSF site[0] where they give some pointers on the kind of support the various SoCs have, but it's very terse.

For the records, I have an Odroid C1 that's collecting dust on a drawer...

[0] https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers

New comment by IronBacon in "Yuzu: Nintendo Switch Emulator"

IronBacon — Sun, 23 Jan 2022 08:50:39 +0000

From what I know, SPINE doesn't use QEMU at all to emulate a PS4, it works with the same concept of Wine, a compatibility layer that translate Orbis syscall with Linux one. Its name follows the same "SPINE is not an emulator" geek joke.

According to Google, Orbital is the one using QEMU.

New comment by IronBacon in "Bash function names can be almost anything"

IronBacon — Sun, 04 Jul 2021 07:58:49 +0000

On Zsh there is also '=' as prefix, at least that's what I normally use, don't recall if it's a default setting or the result of a local configuration...

New comment by IronBacon in "Yank: Yank Terminal Output to Clipboard"

IronBacon — Sun, 28 Mar 2021 12:21:22 +0000

> I realize that I want to copy the command's output after I execute it.

With Zsh, cheating a little, you can achieve it with:

    _insert-last-command-output () {
        LBUFFER+="$(LS_COLORS= TERM=vt220 eval $history[$((HISTCMD-1))])"
    }

There's some junk used for my configuration, the relevant part is the "eval" of the last command on the history, it doesn't paste the output of the previous command but it's execute d again, this time with the output going straight in the edit buffer. I use it to manipulate the output of the previous command on the shell — it works better if the output is a single line — but I think it could be modified to put the output also on the clipboard...

New comment by IronBacon in "Why does Linux have so much trouble sleeping and waking?"

IronBacon — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 21:48:00 +0000

Maybe Intel Smart Connect?

New comment by IronBacon in "Emulating Nintendo Switch Games on Linux"

IronBacon — Sat, 25 Jul 2020 10:55:29 +0000

But there is one for Linux distributions, released more than a year ago as binary only (not sources at the moment) called "Spine" (like as Wine Spine is not an emulator) that's pretty real and can run a few/couple of commercial titles.

Yeah, more a POC that a full emulator but I can assure you that it works, assuming you can decrypt the supported titles, so you'll need an exploitable PS4 or find a dump on the Interweb...

Edit: link https://github.com/devofspine/spinedemo