After a long silence I pushed myself to create a new article. I have many half written materials I can choose from. This time I finished my IR device story. In 2008 my then boss came up with an idea: End-to-End testing/monitoring of the TV services by using real set-top-boxes (STB). One of the interesting […]
I like SjASMPlus because it is small, portable (one exe, no install) and supports writing SNA format, which means it can directly assemble the source into SNA emulator snapshot file. This is very handy if disassembling a snapshot, reverse engineering the code, then comparing the compiled source with the original snapshot. However it has a minor […]
Recently, I found a website which loads very slowly in Internet Explorer 11 (under Windows 7) while other browsers did not affected (Chrome, Firefox). The site has both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses. Tcpdump showed that connection to the IP address is failed, Destination unreachable ICMPv6 messages returned in reply to SYN packets. Despite the address is […]
It could be useful to know the build date of the executable. In most situations this is the file’s timestamp. It is quite simple to read it out in TDateTime format: However, there are situations when the file’s timestamp is altered and the build date is lost.
Today I had to install an Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS system on a two-disk PC, with software RAID1, which I did many times before. The disks and raid setup went fine, but when reaching the GRUB install it reports “fatal error”. I skipped the bootloader install and finished the OS setup. Of course, the system didn’t […]
Many years ago I wanted to create an indoor game which requires an explosion sound effect. I opted for a microcontroller because it’s cheap and easy to program. But didn’t know exactly how to produce that explosion sound. It was obvious that I have to synthesize the sound instead of playing a recorded sample. First a […]
Bomber Man may be the more popular name of this game, but in 1992 for me it was Dyna Blaster on the Amiga. In 2010 I converted the Amiga version to Windows. This game has so many conversions but it was fun to made my own version. Tests were successful on Windows XP and Windows 7 (32-bit […]
In December of 2000 I started a Pac-Man game conversion from the ZX Spectrum. It was one of my favourite Spectrum game in the 80s. Simple but addictive. My original intention was to build a 4K or 16K game for DOS, however I lost my interest during the process. It is playable, so I decided […]
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 […]
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 […]