Hacker News: seritools

New comment by seritools in "Windows 95 contained a workaround for a SimCity 2000 memory bug"

seritools — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:40:02 +0000

just look at that giant 8-line headline, insanity

New comment by seritools in "Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment"

seritools — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:51:25 +0000

then add a second r and it's suddenly piracy or torrent related!

New comment by seritools in "Make ZIP files smaller with ZIP Shrinker"

seritools — Tue, 19 May 2026 10:36:45 +0000

> This has the side effect of removing empty directories

yeah, this will inevitably break things. excluding those from the directory stripping shouldn't be too hard (TM)

New comment by seritools in "Your hex editor should color-code bytes"

seritools — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:13:33 +0000

as far as i can tell, no it does not. it only desaturates 00 in particular. the other colors you see in the screenshots come from matched formats/patterns. it does not do direct coloring based on byte value.

New comment by seritools in "Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux"

seritools — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 14:16:00 +0000

pretty sure 486 support only _just_ got disabled, and will be gone with 7.1: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Phasing-Out-i486

New comment by seritools in "Smoking ban for people born after 2008 in the UK agreed"

seritools — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:17:25 +0000

headlines often trade legibility for terseness, sometimes a bit too much though :)

EDIT: Headlinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headline#Headlinese

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

seritools — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:45:45 +0000

> I miss the wobbly windows I had in Linux when we started playing with Compiz.

KDE still has them: Settings -> Window Management -> Desktop Effects -> Wobbly Windows

New comment by seritools in "Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability"

seritools — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 09:02:28 +0000

you can also just uninstall the "new" notepad, at which point Windows will let you run the old one again (which is still shipped!).

By using a version that is _that_ old you do lose out on some of the actually useful updates legacy nodepad received, such as LF line ending support.

New comment by seritools in "Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability"

seritools — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 08:46:30 +0000

You are mistaken:

> The malicious code would execute in the security context of the user who opened the Markdown file, giving the attacker the same permissions as that user.

New comment by seritools in "Rust at Scale: An Added Layer of Security for WhatsApp"

seritools — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 14:00:45 +0000

TIL I'm an AI

New comment by seritools in "Ask HN: Anyone have a good solution for modern Mac to legacy SCSI converters?"

seritools — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 18:38:13 +0000

not even opposite, as mentioned in my comment it does have Initiator Mode, allowing it to act as a host

New comment by seritools in "Ask HN: Anyone have a good solution for modern Mac to legacy SCSI converters?"

seritools — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 18:37:24 +0000

If the reason to connect them is to dump them, something like https://bluescsi.com/ in Initiator Mode might work: https://bluescsi.com/docs/Initiator-Mode

New comment by seritools in "I tried Gleam for Advent of Code"

seritools — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 18:54:18 +0000

For a quick fix: `font-variant-ligatures: none;` on body or similar.

New comment by seritools in "Microsoft makes Zork open-source"

seritools — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 18:37:27 +0000

Infocom was bought by Activision, ActivisionBlizzard was bought by Microsoft.

New comment by seritools in "Unofficial "Tier 4" Rust Target for older Windows versions"

seritools — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 11:01:32 +0000

Author here -- previous discussions/blog posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23313577

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31112273

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37787161

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38810782

New comment by seritools in "Why Castrol Honda Superbike crashes on (most) modern systems"

seritools — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 21:31:46 +0000

I specifically checked if DirectInput from DirectX 5 already supports/provides USB HID devices, and it does! Granted, even then it was unlikely to encounter 8 USB devices, let alone HID devices in particular.

New comment by seritools in "Why Castrol Honda Superbike crashes on (most) modern systems"

seritools — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 14:29:52 +0000

Because I felt like it :) Also works for multiple versions/patchlevels.

But yeah, with the info provided it should be patchable. It's a `push esi` though, where esi has to stay 0 for a few further usages, so it's a bit more than a one-byte patch. It also wouldn't fully resolve the OOB write in the rare case where you _do_ have 9+ game controllers connected.

New comment by seritools in "Why Castrol Honda Superbike crashes on (most) modern systems"

seritools — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 14:24:57 +0000

Usually dgVoodoo handles most of the games (that don't have actual bugs like this game) fairly well.

Otherwise, 86Box is a pretty good full-system emulator for everything up to the early 3D era.

As for DRM, there's various ways around it of course :)

New comment by seritools in "Why Castrol Honda Superbike crashes on (most) modern systems"

seritools — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 11:35:50 +0000

> am I right in thinking the DirectX library only exports a single function and _everything_ else is through DX interfaces

Yup! That's why I didn't have to create a gazillion passthrough functions.

The original DLL in my modern Windows installation has these 8 exports:

    DirectInputCreateA
    DirectInputCreateEx
    DirectInputCreateW
    DllCanUnloadNow
    DllGetClassObject
    DllRegisterServer
    DllUnregisterServer

The game only calls DirectInputCreateA, and the rest happens via the COM object that that function creates.

New comment by seritools in "Why Castrol Honda Superbike crashes on (most) modern systems"

seritools — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 11:06:39 +0000

Author here -- given that r9x is also my project it wasn't entirely random :^)