I've seen an old Causeway Extender unpacker floating around, at some point being on EXETOOLS before they went forum-only, by the name "CauseWay DOS Extender Unpacker v0.17" or "unpcwc.zip". Is there a copy of this still around or will I have to make my own based on the released Causeway source code?

everyone: "lol missingno amirite"

me, an intellectual: https://youtu.be/SdKsjk_8_Bo

Ok, this is a little impressive. Sega GT 2002 (dumped from my original Xbox I totally have) crashes to this if I don't have a Dashboard loaded.

Cxbx handles this.

That's kinda cool.

people often forget the real first rule of programming: "All user input is malicious."

Very productive day of passive wardriving. Very nice.

woke up in a cold sweat and all i can remember from my nightmare is "there's a party in ring -2 and no one's invited"

Not even brew will save your asses now

n-

N A N I ? ? ? ? ?

my dad just upgraded our phone plan from like 100 miles away out of nowhere.

turns out with some weird discount it's only $20 more for unlimited than our old holdover-from-2012 plan of "8GB pool for all lines, but the last 4GB is 3G speeds"

shit

time to start theorycrafting a way to get around the "one device streaming at a time" limit

Had to track down IDA 5.0 today because I need to decompile a DOS program and DOS' included debugger wasn't cutting it. (Related note: If anyone has a copy of SOURCER, mind sharing?)

oh shit i hadn't noticed lmfao

this isn't even like... ACTIVE shit, this is just me flipping it on in the back seat when my parents drag me places

when you passively wardriving

Was digging through an old HDD's OEM Windows recovery partitions and found FON-format fonts that are accurate to several old systems. Several Commodore and Amiga ones (some for 80-char mode too!) and lots of DOS ones. They have names and everything, but I can't use them after installing them... (there were a few blank ones in there too, which is odd...)

Friendly reminder that some PSUs can literally be chained together with Molex connectors and a couple paperclips.

Added Kali repos to my Debian install, updated, and rebooted to this.

Looks nice, but it's technically advertising hack tools if i'm seen with this background in public so... must change it or i get jail time.

Seems like the #1 rule of thumb in hacking is
"if you can't break it, make it irrelevant".

Seems to be true because god some of these OEM recovery discs are just... awful at securing themselves.

It got so hot in the house today my grandmother's ceiling fan melted inside. It gets up to 350°F when it's spinning now and fucking SCREAMS.

Here are the charred-ass screws we pulled out.

Cracking old recovery CDs for the 9x/2000/XP era shines some light into how companies operated and when concepts came to be in that time:

Packard Bell: An EXE checks that you're running on a Packard Bell machine and reboots if it's not. How do we bypass it? Easy: just fucking delete it. The files to reinstall Windows from scratch come from...
...
C:?
Yup. Turns out Packard Bell was doing the recovery partition thing all the way back to the 9x era, maybe even further. Files aren't even on the restore disc so if your partition table got fucked (pretty common because malware and disk corruption) you were totally fucked and needed to repurchase Windows. (My dad, at the time, only charged at-cost OEM prices for a replacement retail copy. He knew it was dumb so he never sold PB machines.)

Compaq:
Computer check? Nope, remove one line from a BATCH file and it's gone.

Six archives, named "WINA.ZIP" through "WINF.ZIP" (plus one or two extras for OEM software) hold Windows. Problematic? Well... only because they never put the password anywhere so the installer can't install them. (Some interesting on-disc technician-only utils, though!)

Dell:
If not a Dell machine, lock up. Cause? CONFIG.SYS driver masquerading as OAK (the common CD driver) doing the check, then chainloading the real OAK driver. Simple fix: replace the fake driver with the real one.

Issues?

Would I mention this one if there weren't?

Disc is mounted on N:. Subdirectories work, but doing anything in them (a DIR, trying to execute something, trying to view shit in EDIT.COM) kicked you back to the disc root.

Installer couldn't find machine manifest in the MAP folder (it wanted your PC's serial before it'd let you install, to make sure you have the correct recovery disc) so it asked for 12-digit alphanumeric serial. The defined serials in the manifest were something like "02884902-01" or similar (8-2, all numbers) and it couldn't read the file so it couldn't show the right format, nor check for the right type.

Bypassing that issue, trying to do the ACTUAL install process caused nothing to happen... as all BATCHes for install think the CD should be on X:.

Welp.

well that was fun. Now to test on-real-PC behavior, as VBOX and VMWare both don't like the special hardware shit it tries to use. (Why does a textmode GUI need GPU acceleration, COMPAQ?????)

This is from a DOS-era Packard-Bell recovery disk. No one out of the group of like 30 16-yr-olds could crack the password in the installer. I literally just opened it in nano.

What not to do when securing your shit: https://pastebin.com/27j169id

when someone tries to wrap their MIDI in 3 layers of crypto to distribute it without allowing access but they used ZipCrypto on a file format with a 14 byte header where only 4 bytes change

>be me
>watching Clone Hero video
>streamer mentions something about HTML color tags being in a chart's metadata that's displayed properly
>...
>...
>...

>you WHAT

>really

>aight, let's test the clear security hole

*makes 1 note long chart and adds JS to metadata*

*metadata payload triggers when you attempt to play the chart*

FUCKING...

this is dumb.

alright very funny guys

i'm so tall my bluetooth earbuds keep going slightly out of range and garbling the audio

Alright, i'm fucking done.

Fedora: Packages are self-referencial, using the system is like sprinting through a fucking minefield.

Linux Mint: "lol just don't update packages on the repo because shit can't break if it never updates! Don't add custom repos either or we'll just fucking break your PC."

Debian Raw: "We have all of 5 packages on our repos and GPG is fucking broken so you can't add more repos."

Arch: "Have fun modifying the boot disk for 30 hours so it'll boot, and let's tack on another 30 to make it install properly."

Gentoo: "LOL what is swap. Let's just pipe garbage into this partition as fast as the disk will let us for literally no reason. I'm sure you can still use the system for all of 30 minutes, at which point your SSD will give out. No big deal..."

when did Linux go to shit?

Windows isn't any better without billions of tweaks and then a build upgrade (in that order specific) to make it run properly.

Nor is OSX, as it runs on the model of "lol gotta hack your own PC to run custom unapproved binaries!"

Fuck it.

I'm installing DOS.

Need username suggestions for new Debian install.

IMAGINE USING WINDOWS CE IN 2019

TIL one of the first few issues on the ISS was that they had a laptop that wouldn't boot. The (pirated, some say) copy of Norton Ghost they had on a floppy was also suffering from bad sectors, so it wouldn't boot. These guys had an entire floppy image beamed up from base to replace a copy of Norton Ghost. (Some say this was a pirated copy of Norton Ghost, as none of the floppies had the official label, instead all had either hand-written or custom-made labels.)

Then they had codepage issues.

Finally got around to generating and publishing a PGP keypair.

feels nice.

Friendly reminder that most SIM cards are 60MHz Java 1.1 boxes.

Always ensure that, if you have a fixed-length buffer and concatenate strings there, the end result will fit.
https://youtu.be/vZK5nG6oNEw

thanks wine, now my text can be teal blue, pea green or piss yellow instead of shades of gray like it's supposed to be

TIL all x86-compatible CPUs have ISA support and the ability to be reset by the keyboard controller via A20 line, all thanks to not wanting to alienate a single person who refuses to upgrade.

you can put ISA or AGP devices straight onto the fucking LPC bus and it'll work on most CPUs. Y'know, on the same bus as the TPM in most?

you already know i'm gonna put a floppy controller, a parallel port, and an IDE controller on the PCI-e bus with an ISA daughterboard