Software Hacks

956 Articles

How Discord Was Ported To Windows 95 And NT 3.1

June 17, 2025 by 26 Comments

On the desktop, most people use the official HTML and JavaScript-based client for Discord in either a browser or a still-smells-like-a-browser Electron package. Yet what if there was a way to use a third-party client and even run it on Windows XP, Windows 95, and NT 3.1? This is exactly what [iDontProgramInCpp] did with their Discord Messenger project.

Fortunately, as a web ‘app’ the Discord API is readily accessible and they don’t seem to be in a rush to ban third-party clients. But it did require a bit of work to add newer versions of TLS encryption to Windows XP and older. Fortunately OpenSSL still supports these older platforms, so this was not a major hurdle and Windows XP happily ran this new Discord client. That left porting to older Windows versions.

Most of the challenge lies in writing shims for API calls that do not exist on these older platforms when backporting software from Windows XP to older Windows versions, and GCC (MinGW) had to be used instead of MSVC, but this also was a relatively minor detail. Finally, Windows NT 3.1 was picked as the last challenge for Discord Messenger, which ran into MSVCRT runtime issues and required backporting features to the NT 3.1 version that was still part of the OS back then.

[MattKC] covers the project in a recent video, as well as the AeroChat client which targets Windows Live Messenger fans.  Hopefully the API that allows these projects to operate doesn’t get locked down, as third-party clients like these bring their own unique advantages to the Discord ecosystem.

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Open A Portal To An NES Emulator

June 13, 2025 by 2 Comments

The Portal games were revolutionary not only for their puzzle-based, narrative-driven gameplay, but also for their unique physics engine, which let players open portals anywhere and conserve momentum and direction through them. They’re widely regarded as some of the best video games ever made, but even beyond that they have some extra features that aren’t talked about as much. Namely, there are a number of level editors and mods that allow the in-game components to be used to build things like logic gates and computers, and this project goes even further by building a working NES emulator, all within Portal 2.

The main limitation here is that Portal 2 can only support a certain number of in-game objects without crashing, far lower than what would be needed to directly emulate NES hardware. The creator of the project, [PortalRunner], instead turned to Squirrel, the Portal 2 scripting language, and set about porting an existing NES emulator called smolnes to this scripting language. This is easier said than done, as everything in the code needs to be converted eight bits and then all of the pointers in smolnes need to be converted to use arrays, since Squirrel doesn’t support pointers at all. As can be easily imagined, this led to a number of bugs that needed to be sorted out before the game would run at all.

For those interested in code golfing, porting, or cross-compatibility, this project is a master class not only in the intricacies of the Portal 2 scripting language but in the way the NES behaves as well, not to mention the coding skill needed to recognize unique behaviors of the C language and the Squirrel scripting language. But eventually [PortalRunner] is able to get Super Mario Bros. running in Portal 2, albeit with low resolution and frame rate. Since we heard you like games within games, someone else put DOOM inside DOOM so you can DOOM while you DOOM.

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The Billionth Repository On GitHub Is Really Shitty

June 12, 2025 by 40 Comments

What’s the GitHub repository you have created that you think is of most note? Which one do you think of as your magnum opus, the one that you will be remembered by? Was it the CAD files and schematics of a device for ending world hunger, or perhaps it was software designed to end poverty? Spare a thought for [AasishPokhrel] then, for his latest repository is one that he’ll be remembered by for all the wrong reasons. The poor guy created a repository with a scatalogical name, no doubt to store random things, but had the misfortune to inadvertently create the billionth repository on GitHub.

At the time of writing, the 💩 repository sadly contains no commits. But he seems to have won an unexpectedly valuable piece of Internet real estate judging by the attention it’s received, and if we were him we’d be scrambling to fill it with whatever wisdom we wanted the world to see. A peek at his other repos suggests he’s busy learning JavaScript, and we wish him luck in that endeavor.

We think everyone will at some time or another have let loose some code into the wild perhaps with a comment they later regret, or a silly name that later comes back to haunt them. We know we have. So enjoy a giggle at his expense, but don’t give him a hard time. After all, this much entertainment should be rewarded.

Open Source CAD In The Browser

June 12, 2025 by 43 Comments

Some people love tools in their browsers. Others hate them. We certainly do like to see just how far people can push the browser and version 0.6 of CHILI3D, a browser-based CAD program, certainly pushes.

If you click the link, you might want to find the top right corner to change the language (although a few messages stubbornly refuse to use English). From there, click New Document and you’ll see an impressive slate of features in the menus and toolbars.

The export button is one of those stubborn features. If you draw something and select export, you’ll see a dialog in Chinese. Translated it has the title: Select and a checkmark for “Determined” and a red X for “Cancelled.” If you select some things in the drawing and click the green checkmark, it will export a brep file. That file format is common with CAD programs, but you’ll need to convert, probably, if you want to 3D print your design.

The project’s GitHub repository shows an impressive slate of features, but also notes that things are changing as this is alpha software. The CAD kernel is a common one brought in via WebAssembly, so there shouldn’t be many simple bugs involving geometry.

We’ve seen a number of browser-based tools that do some kind of CAD. CADmium is a recent entry into the list. Or, stick with OpenSCAD. We sometimes go low-tech for schematics.

Randomly Generating Atari Games

June 11, 2025 by 25 Comments

They say that if you let a million monkeys type on a million typewriters, they will eventually write the works of Shakespeare. While not quite the same thing [bbenchoff] (why does that sound familiar?), spent some computing cycles to generate random data and, via heuristics, find valid Atari 2600 “games” in the data.

As you might expect, the games aren’t going to be things you want to play all day long. In fact, they are more like demos. However, there are a number of interesting programs, considering they were just randomly generated.

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Network Infrastructure And Demon-Slaying: Virtualization Expands What A Desktop Can Do

June 11, 2025 by 20 Comments

The original DOOM is famously portable — any computer made within at least the last two decades, including those in printers, heart monitors, passenger vehicles, and routers is almost guaranteed to have a port of the iconic 1993 shooter. The more modern iterations in the series are a little trickier to port, though. Multi-core processors, discrete graphics cards, and gigabytes of memory are generally needed, and it’ll be a long time before something like an off-the-shelf router has all of these components.

But with a specialized distribution of Debian Linux called Proxmox and a healthy amount of configuration it’s possible to flip this idea on its head: getting a desktop computer capable of playing modern video games to take over the network infrastructure for a LAN instead, all with minimal impact to the overall desktop experience. In effect, it’s possible to have a router that can not only play DOOM but play 2020’s DOOM Eternal, likely with hardware most of us already have on hand.

The key that makes a setup like this work is virtualization. Although modern software makes it seem otherwise, not every piece of software needs an eight-core processor and 32 GB of memory. With that in mind, virtualization software splits modern multi-core processors into groups which can act as if they are independent computers. These virtual computers or virtual machines (VMs) can directly utilize not only groups or single processor cores independently, but reserved portions of memory as well as other hardware like peripherals and disk drives.

Proxmox itself is a version of Debian with a number of tools available that streamline this process, and it installs on PCs in essentially the same way as any other Linux distribution would. Once installed, tools like LXC for containerization, KVM for full-fledged virtual machines, and an intuitive web interface are easily accessed by the user to allow containers and VMs to be quickly set up, deployed, backed up, removed, and even sent to other Proxmox installations. Continue reading “Network Infrastructure And Demon-Slaying: Virtualization Expands What A Desktop Can Do” →

The Saleae logic analyzer software is shown. One PWM channel is active, with values of 0x0001 displayed above the individual waveforms. On the right panel of the app, a trigger mode configuration panel is open for the simple parallel analyzer.

Simple Triggering For Saleae Logic Analyzers

June 8, 2025 by 4 Comments

Saleae logic analyzers seem to have it all: good sampling rates, convenient protocol decoding, and plenty of channels – but not a good way to set rising or falling-edge triggering. [James] found this rather inconvenient when debugging embedded devices, and shared a workaround that replicates these simple triggering modes.

Crucially, the logic analyzer’s software has a repeated triggering mode that fires when the protocol decoder detects a preset value. [James] used a clever trick to turn this into a rising-edge trigger: he set up a simple parallel analyzer, and set the signal in question as both the sampled channel and the clock signal. Since he wanted to detect the rising edge, he set the clock mode accordingly. Next, he loaded the simple parallel decoder’s trigger configuration and set it to detect a value of one, the value of a high signal. When he ran the simple parallel trigger, every rising edge of the input signal would trigger the clock to check for a high value on the line, in turn triggering the analyzer.

It’s also possible to set up a falling-edge trigger by selecting the falling-edge clock mode and setting the trigger mode to detect a value of zero. Setting up more complex triggers involving multiple channels is as simple as calculating the hexadecimal value of the desired state and setting the parallel decoder to trigger on that value. For example, if you want to trigger when one input is low and another is high, you can set the decoder to trigger on a value or one or two, depending on which order the inputs come in.

If all this makes you interested in Saleae logic analyzers, we’ve seen them used for everything from floppy disk preservation to signal generation. We’ve even reviewed their earliest model back in 2009.

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