Hacker News: seritools

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 :^)

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

seritools — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 11:04:47 +0000

AFAIK they are all backed up. For the blogpost I used the DX5 SDK docs, DX7 SDK docs, and the MSDN Library from VS2005 (last version to include 9x information).

The VS2008 version purged all API information regarding pre-Windows 2000.

New comment by seritools in "Thunk: Build Rust program to support Windows XP, Vista and more"

seritools — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 19:08:48 +0000

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_C%2B%2B#Histo..., the last version to support Win3.1 is VC++ 1.52 (which was shipped with VC++ up to version 4).

Unless you mean NT3.1 of course :^)

New comment by seritools in "Thunk: Build Rust program to support Windows XP, Vista and more"

seritools — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 17:38:22 +0000

this comment thread hasn't been talking about win16.

but you're right, win16 can only load some 32-bit PE files through something like Win32s

New comment by seritools in "Thunk: Build Rust program to support Windows XP, Vista and more"

seritools — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 17:34:03 +0000

sorry, i was referring specifically to the x86 segmented memory model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_memory_segmentation (basically, near and far pointers)

New comment by seritools in "Thunk: Build Rust program to support Windows XP, Vista and more"

seritools — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 15:20:15 +0000

it would, just without standard library support, as the default stdlib imports system APIs that older versions don't provide. Other than those and a "supported OS version" filed in the PE header there isn't really much else in your way (hence my Rust9x project)

New comment by seritools in "Thunk: Build Rust program to support Windows XP, Vista and more"

seritools — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 15:17:28 +0000

likely no_std, and running via Win32s. Rust doesn't have support for segmented memory, so native 16-bit would be much harder