boricj · HackerLangs

21 ชั่วโมงที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

Some of us work with industrial SoCs, with puny in-order Cortex-A7 cores and tiny L1/L2 caches. Sometimes, you really need to optimize for the hardware and micro-architecture you have in order to hit the performance goals required and message passing isn't always the answer.

boricj

4 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

The Sega Saturn might also qualify, as its sound subsystem has a 68000 with 512 KiB of RAM. Running Linux on it might be trickier though.

boricj

8 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

The making of is well worth a read: https://phoboslab.org/log/2021/09/q1k3-making-of

boricj

16 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

If I understand it correctly, it basically boils down to copying bits from the source to the destination, in order from the least significant bit to the most significant bit. It's not equivalent to C++'s reinterpret_cast.

I'm no Zig expert, but if you want endian-dependent semantics I'd assume either @ptrCast or a packed union would do the job.

boricj

25 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I've received a couple of emails about ghidra-delinker-extension, but I would not limit this to only emails. I've also had numerous people contacting me through GitHub issues or Discord messages over the years, with this as a topic starter.

I've had deep technical exchanges with smart people all across the world I would've never met otherwise. I've seen people using my tool for completely insane projects successfully. I've even had a data scientist from India who was inspired and motivated by my story of presenting at ACM 2025 as a hobbyist to put his work out there.

Interacting with all these people has broadened my horizons - literally going halfway across the globe in one instance. All of that happened despite me being an introvert, who hates initiating any form of social interactions with people and sounds like a raving lunatic on my blog.

Maybe I should be the one to send out more emails...

boricj

27 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I can't seem to find a list of supported hardware (or at least hardware which is supposed to work). Will it run on a UltraSPARC T2 server? I've got one collecting dust in the basement.

boricj

27 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

It's https://boricj.net and you should read it if you like software development and Doctor Frankenstein combined.

(hint: I showcase Mad Max-driven software development on it)

boricj

28 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

Personally, a voxel space renderer for the PlayStation (Comanche terrain style rendering).

In theory, it's really not suited for this because (at least back then) this was designed for computers with:

- relatively large amounts of RAM (uncompressed color+heightmap data takes a lot of space),

- fast CPUs with data caches (it's a 2D trapezoidal walk of a top-down projected fustrum with plenty of additions, multiplications and divisions),

- memory-mapped linear framebuffers (for software rendering).

The PlayStation has none of these things: only 2 MiB of main RAM; an in-order scalar 33 MHz MIPS III processor without a FPU or a data cache, where any CPU load from main RAM stalls the pipeline for 5 cycles, multiplications have a 6 to 13 cycles latency and divisions have a 36 cycles latency; and the only way to touch VRAM is to send commands to the 2D GPU.

What it does have is 4 KiB of I-cache (direct-mapped), 1 KiB of scratchpad with no wait states and a fixed-point GTE coprocessor which is mostly geared towards projecting 3D points onto a 2D screen and not general matrix/vector processing. Meaning that if I get my hot loop within 1024 instructions (and no function calls), fit my working set+stack within 1 KiB and can pipeline the GTE for transformations and the CPU for map scanning/GPU submissions, it might just work.

So far I'm getting decent framerates (like 10-15 FPS at 256x240) with just software projection and GPU line rendering. Right now I'm wrestling with the GTE and various ways to trick it into transforming more points than it's supposed to be able to do, by looking at the fixed-hardware math equations for the various instructions and trying to fit my equations into them (doing stuff like putting relative altitude into X/Y vector registers instead of coordinates and massaging the rest of the values to get screen Y coordinates out of it).

Kind of a hardcore topic to pick for my first homebrew ever, but I craved a simpler, low-level optimization challenge as a pipe cleaner, after working on ghidra-delinker-extension for so long.

boricj

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

I'm only pointing out that ever since the French revolution, we have a rich history of regime change (and also of strikes and demonstrations). Some were due to external factors (like the Vichy régime during WW2) and some were bloodless (like the end of the Fourth Republic).

Us rolling the dice whenever we have a major political crisis is a meme at this point, for better or for worse we're just not the kind of people to keep the same constitution around for 250 years.

boricj

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

Probably because we have a well established history of regularly changing regimes. Since we overthrew royalty in 1789 we've had five republics, two empires, three monarchies and a bunch of short-lived totalitarian regimes, coups and other major political events.

If anything, the longevity of the Fifth Republic is starting to become unusual (only the Third Republic and the Ancien Régime have lasted longer). Maybe we're overdue to flip the table again as per tradition.

boricj

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

Isn't the information in this already largely known and documented? There have been over 30 years of tinkering, reverse-engineering work and assembly programs on the (e)z80 TI graphing calculators.

Incidentally, that lineage has finally come to an end as TI has released the TI-84 Evo-T, which uses an ARM Cortex-M core and a firmware apparently rewritten from the ground up.

boricj

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

I'm tinkering with a voxel space rendering tech demo as a PlayStation homebrew. After one weekend of work I'm getting decent results (like, 10-15 FPS) and I've yet to use the DMA, the GTE or even polylines primitives.

It's refreshing to dust up trigonometry and good old low-level optimization tricks. When the scratchbuffer has 1 KiB and the stack can only use a fraction of that, it makes me realize how spoiled I'm at work with the microcontrollers we have, with threads being allocated 8 KiB of stack and backtraces with over 50 functions of C++ templates on it.

boricj

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

> The Dassault family has very close ties with the French government and defense industry. There's no doubt in my mind that if the French government gets serious and says "Jump!" Dassault would just ask "How high?"

I'll push back on that point.

The FCAS program was originally conceived as a French-German joint political initiative by Macron and Merkel. The NGF plane within it has been dead in the water for years because Airbus and Dassault can't work out their disagreements. It's a conflict between two industrial companies that's blocking forward progress, with the Airbus and Dassault CEOs duking it out across press releases and shareholder meetings.

If Dassault was a French state puppet, Macron would've strong-armed Dassault into working with Airbus on this €100 billion project by now. Yet, the French President seems to know better than to try and do that. One does not get to be basically the only major private independent defense company in a famously nationalized French defense industry during the Cold War without managing to hold the French state at arm's length, especially during the nationalization years of Mitterand's presidency.

Though your concerns about ownership of the Dutch defense industry are certainly valid, I don't see how the European defense industry could have completely avoided consolidation after the end of the Cold War, given the budget cuts to defense. The Americans went much further on that front and nowadays the lack of internal competition is causing them all kinds of problems for them.

boricj

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

If you want a good horror bedtime story, you can peek at OpenBIOS within the pcsx-redux tree: https://github.com/grumpycoders/pcsx-redux/tree/main/src/mip...

The commentary section starts with "The retail PlayStation BIOS code is a constellation of bugs and bad design." and it gets worse after that. There are hidden gems inside the source code comments of that simili-reconstruction.

boricj

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

The days of nationalized French defense companies and state arsenals have been over for quite a while. Assuming I didn't make any mistakes:

GIAT was privatized, then renamed to Nexter, then merged with German KMW to form European KNDS and now it's about to do an IPO.

All of the French aerospace industry (including missiles) bar Dassault and Thales is inside Airbus.

Arquus was bought by Belgian John Cockerill.

I could probably cite more if I dug deeper, but while we still have French defense companies like Dassault, Naval Group and Thales, a fair amount of our defense industry is no longer exclusively French owned.

And if the French government or owner starts getting uppity, you could always take a page from the Swedes and how they Kockums the shit out of ThyssenKrupp.

boricj

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

When you are interacting with the government for official business, what purpose is there to hide one's identity? You can't exactly not fill in your name in your tax return.

For the non-government/private business however, it is indeed a matter of privacy. France rolled out a while ago the requirement to establish the user's age when accessing porn sites. I refuse to do that.

boricj

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

For France it certainly is, probably because of our stubborn focus on strategic autonomy. For example, offshoring passport printing to me sounds like a great opportunity for identity theft and document forgery by people outside of your jurisdiction.

I do kinda get the China customs system example though, only because if corruption is bad enough that it's a greater concern than opsec, then you're kinda hosed anyways.

boricj

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

As a French person, I'm confused as to why DigiD is not a government-run project like FranceConnect is. I'm even more bewildered that an American company thought that they could take over the national identity management system of an European country, as if this was business as usual.

boricj

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

You could do that on PC too, if you mmap() one given block of memory at multiple locations. I think that's how PS1 emulators handle mirroring (it's been a long time since I took a peek at the innards of DuckStation).

boricj

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

Graphically, either play on a CRT (or with CRT filters) or use an emulator that has PGXP geometry correction to eliminate vertex jittering at higher rendering resolutions.

As for gameplay, that console has a massive library, with thousands of commercially released games (and a lot of hidden gems). I'd be surprised if any gamer wouldn't find at least one to their taste in that catalog.