[HN Gopher] Patching 68K Software - SimpleText
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Patching 68K Software - SimpleText
Author : mmoogle
Score : 96 points
Date : 2025-11-04 22:59 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (tinkerdifferent.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tinkerdifferent.com)
| mjg59 wrote:
| This is beautiful, but the real takeaway should be that even
| proprietary software you only have binaries for is still mutable.
| The computer runs the code you want it to run. We always need to
| maintain that and prevent scenarios where general purpose
| computers stop being the default.
| LennyHenrysNuts wrote:
| We were always doing this kind of thing on these platforms.
| This is how we used to hack copy protection out of games.
|
| Stepping through, line by line, editing the code and adding
| JMPs to get around the copy protection code after loading the
| magic numbers into the register...
|
| Happy, happy times.
| classichasclass wrote:
| Then they started loading the protection code from disk doing
| tricky things. One I cracked recently was a pair of Commodore
| 1541 sectors that appeared to be the same logical sector
| (because the drive head is blind). It needed to hit both of
| them to compile the next portion of the loader. Naturally the
| segment up to that point was encrypted as well, but nothing
| survives a VICE breakpoint.
| https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2023/08/cracking-designwares-
| gra...
|
| Obviously this is nothing on things like V-MAX! and Rapidlok
| which even nowadays have variations that are tough to
| remaster.
| a96 wrote:
| That's how I first learned assembly. Armed with a monitor
| program that can disassemble and modify memory, I read and
| modified programs stepping through them. Mostly games,
| naturally. I never got an actual assembler/linker chain that
| would work and useful software was hard to come by.
| userbinator wrote:
| Unfortunately the whole "open source" movement has diverted
| attention away from that and brainwashed countless would-be
| power-users and even developers into believing that they are
| powerless to do anything without the source code. It's
| convenient to have the source, but not necessary for freedom.
| disruptiveink wrote:
| Cat's out of the bag there already. We all have general purpose
| computing devices in our pockets, locked down on purpose.
| Android used to allow you to gain admin rights but it's been
| getting more and more impossible to do so while still keeping
| most of your programs working. It's not only a cat-and-mouse
| game against "rooting detection" SDKs companies licence and
| plug into their apps out of a misguided duty of care, but it's
| especially bad with anything that uses Google's remote
| attestation lately.
|
| Android is also about to lock down "sideloading", another
| "great" dysphemism for "installing software".
|
| Moving the Overton window on this has been so successful, that
| even people in our industry happily accepted the much maligned
| dysphemisms of "jailbreaking" and "rooting" for what used to be
| called "local admin rights" and look upon such access as if
| it's only something pirates, criminals or malware spreaders
| would want to do.
|
| I say this as someone who is running an Android phone with a
| kernel with some backported patches applied and compiled by
| myself. The fact that I can do it is great. The fact that the
| entire industry is trying to make it as frustrating as possible
| for me to do this under the guise of false premises such as
| "security" is disheartening.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > even proprietary software you only have binaries for is still
| mutable
|
| POKE 35136, 0
|
| thus it ever was.
| musicale wrote:
| I thought option-resize was supposed to resize the default (new
| document) window?
|
| My recent pet peeve is that macOS doesn't seem to remember window
| sizes and locations properly. Things are certainly complicated by
| multi-monitor setups, but it seems like some sensible default
| behavior could be implemented.
|
| I don't dislike the column browser, but I wish macOS would
| preserve/revive its spatial UI in both the Finder and document
| window positions.
| chongli wrote:
| I really miss the spatial classic Mac OS too. I don't think
| spatial orientation will ever come back to the Mac. Apple seems
| to have moved on completely.
|
| In some ways, the world has moved on as well. Spatial
| orientation worked really well when the number of files and
| folders we typically dealt with was fairly small in number. Now
| we tend to deal with huge numbers of files, most of which
| aren't even on our local computer. It's hard for me to imagine
| how a spatial system like that could be made to work with all
| of that. What would a "spatial Wikipedia" look like?
| girl2 wrote:
| I had to do this at work once
| robinhouston wrote:
| I used to love doing this sort of thing back in the early '90s.
| What a nostalgic read! Funny that there are still people doing it
| today.
| unwind wrote:
| For people not used to reading MC8k assembly [1], it's helpful to
| point out the basic fact that the syntax is in general
| opcode source, destination
|
| which is the other way around from most contemporary ISA:s. So a
| line like move.l d0, -(a7)
|
| will first decrement the value of register a7, then write the
| contents of register d0 to the resulting address (it's a "push"
| for a downwards-growing stack).
|
| Edit: added Wiki-linkage.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68000#Instruction_set...
| marssaxman wrote:
| 68K style always made more sense to me: we read left-to-right,
| after all. Why should we suddenly switch directions for the
| operand order? It's confusing.
| TomMasz wrote:
| I fondly remember patching 68K code in memory on an industrial
| control system my company was developing. I was able to decode
| the instructions just by looking at the hex display. Daresay, I
| could not do that with any modern system.
| Zigurd wrote:
| The first assembler I had to look at was PDP-11 code. 68k is
| kind of like a 32 bit PDP-11, easy to see what's happening. One
| of my very first paid tech jobs was maintaining an ST506 driver
| written in 68k asm by game hackers using self modifying code
| for no specific reason other than that's how they roll.
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(page generated 2025-11-05 23:02 UTC)