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  • Disassembling the MICRO-POKEer ROM firmware

    Posted on December 31st, 2014 admin No comments

    The MICRO-POKEer is a Multiface-like device for the unexpanded 48K Spectrum, introduced around 1988-1989 by a Hungarian company, Micro-Studio.

    Basically it is useful to cheat games (i.e. poke infinite lives), save snapshots (e.g. save game progress, hack programs, remove copy protections) and save active screen content (e.g. print, game maps).

    MICRO-POKEer capabilities:

    * Freeze programs (NMI button)
    * Load/Save screen content (16384 – 23295, 6.75 KBytes)
    * Load/Save the entire RAM (16384 – 65535, total 48 KBytes)
    * Turbo Load/Save (double speed)
    * Peek/Poke/Jump to memory location
    * Warm reset the Spectrum
    * Hard reset

    I own one device and reverse-engineered it in 2010. Firmware version is 1.6

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  • High resolution ping for Windows

    Posted on December 30th, 2014 admin No comments

    This little tool can generate sub-millisecond precision ICMP Echo messages. The interval between consecutive packets, the results or the waiting timeout are all in microseconds. The main idea behind this tool is the ICMP packets should be sent at constant interval so waiting for an outsanding message won’t block further messages. For instance, you cannot set packet interval in Windows’ internal ping.exe. Only members of the Administrators group can use this tool since it uses a raw socket. After a successful run the min/max/avg and stdev round trip times are calculated.

    This tool is successfully tested on Windows XP and Windows 7 machines. You can download the binary here.

    The full source code can be downloaded here. It’s for Delphi or Free Pascal compilers. The HresPing.pas unit can be used in other projects. Successfully tested in Free Pascal 2.6.4 and Delphi 6.

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