jaidamack
@jaidamack

Use a thing. Get caught. Lie and say you won't use it again. Use it again, get caught a second time. Lie that you didn't. Get pressured on it, admit it, then insist that it's no fault of yours since it's third party work and AI tools are emergent in industry standard tools.

I am done pussyfooting around it. Magic and D&D's cultural prominence is a fucking millstone around the necks of nerd fandom and it needs to be done with.

PLAY. ANOTHER. GAME.



cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

the windows NT 4 install process contains a tripping hazard so profound that i'm surprised joel spolsky never wrote a blog post about it


apocryphalmess
@apocryphalmess

my very first real job back in the early 90s was working for IBM Personal Software Products, which had (if I remember correctly) just shipped OS/2 v2.2. my primary job was triage and routing, i.e. "which line in Boca Raton do I transfer this caller to", based on what their problem was, if they were a Big Fucking Customer or not (we got a lot of calls from Abbott Labs who were an IBM shop at the time), if they had a service contract, etc etc

most of the calls we got were OS/2-related, as that was the most widely-used IBM Personal Software Product at the time, as it was something you could buy in CompUSA in a retail box. this was also before CD-ROM drives were universal, so many of these were floppy installs; one of the new and exciting problems that occurred while I was there was that the first IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM drives were just coming out, Gateway was putting them in their new desktop systems, and OS/2 didn't have a driver for that yet, just SCSI and the various proprietary drive interfaces (Matsushita/Panasonic, Sony, and Mitsumi IIRC)

the majority of my coworkers were just phone people, they had just enough tech knowledge to route the calls properly, but I was a young nerd (maybe 20?) and I wanted to get promoted and so I was learning stuff, and if I could give a caller a quick answer or fix and avoid routing them to the people who were paid properly in Boca Raton, that was fine with my supervisors. so I had to tell a lot of people that they couldn't install OS/2 via CD-ROM on their new system, but that we were working on it. (I think Warp 3 was the first version to support those drives but that was after I left)

anyway, one day I got a call from one of those big companies. there was the entire upper echelon of their IT group on a conference call, they had just performed an upgrade on a very, very fucking important server from OS/2 v2.1 to v2.2. everyone was on hand for it, and now the server wasn't booting after the upgrade process

I got their account details, and was writing up whatever we called a ticket internally (it was something very IBM and absurd) and getting ready to transfer them to the Big Accounts line where they would get white glove treatment, and I asked them what was happening when they attempted to restart the server

"we're getting an error message we don't recognize, let me read it to you":

OS/2 !! SYS01475
OS/2 !! SYS02027

I paused. "sir, if I can ask you to do something real quick before I transfer you? can you check and see if one of the upgrade floppies is still in the drive? I'm fully prepared to transfer you, but can we check this first, just in case? it may save you some time."

my supervisor got in touch with me later to say that they received a very angry call from that client the following week, not because I hadn't done a good job, they were very happy that I was able to get their server booting for them in about five minutes instead of the many hours of data recovery and server rebuild they were expecting, but because those error messages had required them to call in the first place

those error messages, which you get when you try to a boot from a non-bootable HPFS floppy, date to the OS/2 v1.2 release in 1989. their utter uselessness pre-dates the split from Microsoft and IBM that led to the development of Windows NT, and I'm pretty sure that if I acquired a copy of ArcaOS and formatted an HPFS floppy with it, it would do the exact same thing



Danthrax
@Danthrax

For 28 years, North American owners of Saturn sidescrolling platformer Clockwork Knight 2 have had an entire extra game on their discs and never knew it.

That changed on Christmas Eve last month when Bo Bayles found a cheat code to unlock the first Clockwork Knight game in Clockwork Knight 2.

At CK2's title screen, pressing up, down, left, up, left, down, right, up, L, R, L, R causes jingle to sound. After pressing the start button, a green "Part 1" box is seen that normally isn't there in the U.S. version.

A screenshot of the Clockwork Knight 2 menu after inputting the cheat code, showing a box labeled Part 1

Bo Bayles posted a video to X, formerly Twitter, showing off the code being input.

Well known for digging through the game code for secrets in other Saturn titles like Burning Rangers and Nights into Dreams, Bo Bayles discussed on his blog how he found Clockwork Knight 2's cheat code in the first place. First he identified which memory addresses were storing controller inputs, then looked for spots in the game's code using those memory addresses. That led him to finding a section that looks for a particular string of inputs — the cheat code that unlocks Clockwork Knight 1.

For those with an optical drive emulator, an Action Replay cartridge or some other way of playing patched games, Bo Bayles uploaded to SegaXtreme an Xdelta patch that enables CK1 in CK2 without needing to input a code at all.

This isn't even a surprise to Saturn fans from back in the day — find out why in my full story on Sega Saturn SHIRO!



cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

Wow, this debuted at #2 in my last 10 uploads and is "appealing to a wider audience than usual" per youtube. I spent the last week wondering if all this effort was worth it and it turns out it was. My instincts are consistently wrong lmao