Hacker News: bbayles

New comment by bbayles in "A 0-click exploit chain for the Pixel 10"

bbayles — Fri, 15 May 2026 14:42:15 +0000

I've reported a few very serious issues to vendors of widely used tools in recent weeks, and it's been even more difficult than usual to get them to be acknowledged - the teams that respond are reportedly swamped.

New comment by bbayles in "An unknown Sega Saturn project has come to light after 29 years"

bbayles — Sat, 02 May 2026 15:13:42 +0000

The developer of this tech demo also worked on porting Resident Evil 2 to Nintendo 64. This was quite the challenge - two discs worth of content had to be made to fit onto a single cart.

In an interview, he describes several engineering heroics that were involved in making everything work: https://hiddenpalace.substack.com/p/hidden-palace-podcast-ep...

An unknown Sega Saturn project has come to light after 29 years

bbayles — Sat, 02 May 2026 12:39:52 +0000

Article URL: https://32bits.substack.com/p/under-the-microscope-pyramid-unreleased

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47985901

Points: 112

# Comments: 2

Censorship on High Score Screen

bbayles — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:59:31 +0000

Article URL: https://32bits.substack.com/p/what-you-cant-say-in-a-saturn-game

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47489660

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Using Ghidra to correct the record on a 24 year old PlayStation game

bbayles — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 21:09:43 +0000

Article URL: https://32bits.substack.com/p/under-the-microscope-syphon-filter

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891812

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by bbayles in "Show HN: Ghidra MCP Server – 110 tools for AI-assisted reverse engineering"

bbayles — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 16:02:12 +0000

LLMs are very good at understanding decompiled code. I don't think people have updated on the fact that almost everything is effectively open source now!

New comment by bbayles in "Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale"

bbayles — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 16:53:19 +0000

I'm sympathetic to this view, but I also wonder if this is the same thing that assembly language programmers said about compilers. What do you mean that you never look at the machine code? What if the compiler does something inefficient?

New comment by bbayles in "Dev-owned testing: Why it fails in practice and succeeds in theory"

bbayles — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 21:22:21 +0000

Let's call the person in question Alex. Having to make every new feature Alex-proof made all of the engineers better.

New comment by bbayles in "Dev-owned testing: Why it fails in practice and succeeds in theory"

bbayles — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 21:20:59 +0000

In order to avoid the endless cycle with the QA person, I started doing this:

> This forced me to start making my feature proposals as small as possible. I would defensively document everything, and sprinkle in little summaries to make things as clear as possible. I started writing scripts to help isolate the new behavior during testing.

Which is what I should have been doing in the first place!

New comment by bbayles in "Dev-owned testing: Why it fails in practice and succeeds in theory"

bbayles — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:54:20 +0000

I used to work with a QA person who really drove me nuts. They would misunderstand the point of a feature, and then write pages and pages of misguided commentary about what they saw when trying to test it. We'd repeat this a few times for every release.

This forced me to start making my feature proposals as small as possible. I would defensively document everything, and sprinkle in little summaries to make things as clear as possible. I started writing scripts to help isolate the new behavior during testing.

...eventually I realized that this person was somehow the best QA person I'd ever worked with.

Recovering video game cheat codes from a long-defunct phone hotline service

bbayles — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 15:04:10 +0000

Article URL: https://32bits.substack.com/p/under-the-microscope-lma-manager

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527170

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by bbayles in "Paged Out"

bbayles — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 21:40:33 +0000

There's a typo in the URL here: > If you have a topic in mind but are not sure if it is suitable for Paged Out!, check out the Writing Articles page or contact us

It links to `?page=writing.pho` rather than `.php`

New comment by bbayles in "Microsoft won't let me pay a $24 bill, blocking thousands in Azure spending"

bbayles — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 20:07:34 +0000

(channeling Patrick McKenzie) If you have an S&P 500 index fund, you're a shareholder in Microsoft. Call their Investor Relations people, or send them a letter with this description. They will probably be of some help!

Every cheat site has the wrong code for Michelin Rally Masters

bbayles — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 14:25:53 +0000

Article URL: https://32bits.substack.com/p/under-the-microscope-michelin-rally

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46121487

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

How many video games include a marriage proposal? At least one

bbayles — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 15:33:51 +0000

Article URL: https://32bits.substack.com/p/under-the-microscope-ncaa-basketball

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916094

Points: 342

# Comments: 86

New comment by bbayles in "Finding a 27-year-old easter egg in the Power Mac G3 ROM"

bbayles — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 16:14:21 +0000

Agree on video games! I recently found a "developer photo insert" Easter egg in an old 3DO game: https://32bits.substack.com/p/under-the-microscope-total-ecl...

Under the microscope: Batman Begins (Playstation 2, GameCube, Xbox) )

bbayles — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 19:55:17 +0000

Article URL: https://32bits.substack.com/p/under-the-microscope-batman-begins

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44278423

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Reverse Engineering "DNA Sequences" in the Lost World: Jurassic Park Video Game

bbayles — Wed, 07 May 2025 15:51:08 +0000

Article URL: https://32bits.substack.com/p/under-the-microscope-the-lost-world

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43917278

Points: 95

# Comments: 5

New comment by bbayles in "Shenmue (1999) reverse engineering reveals possible sun position oversight"

bbayles — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 19:33:28 +0000

Fantastic game!

The same development studio, Sega AM2, recently had a developer reveal that he had put an Easter egg into Fighters Megamix for Saturn. However, he mistakenly introduced a crash bug in it.

This set me off looking for the Easter egg. After a couple days of reverse engineering, I finally found it [0]! I love looking for this stuff.

[0] https://32bits.substack.com/p/bonus-fighters-megamix

New comment by bbayles in "Attacking the hashing function in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2"

bbayles — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 12:36:34 +0000

Excellent - these seem indeed to work. I'll try to figure out what they do.

I'll write up the results eventually. I sent you a note about crediting your contribution here. Many thanks!