Software Hacks

914 Articles

It’s Never Too Late For A Fixed SimCity 2000

January 23, 2025 by 32 Comments

Some retro games need a little help running on modern systems, and it’s not always straightforward. SimCity 2000 Special Edition is one such game and [araxestroy]’s sc2kfix bugfix DLL shows that the process can require a nontrivial amount of skill and finesse. The result? A SimCity 2000 Special Edition that can run without crash or compromise on modern Windows machines, surpassing previous fixes.

SimCity 2000 Special Edition was a release for Windows 95 that allowed the game to work in windowed glory. The executable is capable of running under modern Windows systems (and at high resolutions!) but it’s got a few problems lurking under the hood.

There are crash issues during save/load dialog boxes, and a big visual problem. Animations rely on palette swapping for the game’s animations, and the technique originally used simply does not work right on modern displays. A fellow named [Guspaz] created SC2KRepainter to partially deal with this by forcing window redraws, but it’s an imperfect fix with a few side effects of it’s own.

[araxestroy]’s new solution eliminates dialog crashes and restores the animations, letting them look exactly as they should even on modern systems. It does this elegantly not by patching the executable or running a separate process, but by making the changes in memory at runtime with the help of a specially-crafted .dll file. Just grab winmm.dll from the latest release and put it into the same folder as simcity.exe, then launch the game to enjoy it as the designers intended!

Patching old games is a scene that helps ensure not only that classics never die, but also helps them be appreciated in new ways. Heck, even E.T. for the Atari 2600 has gotten tweaked, highlighting the misunderstood nature of the game in the process.

Dillo Turns 25, And Releases A New Version

January 19, 2025 by 13 Comments

The chances are overwhelming, that you are reading this article on a web browser powered by some form of the Blink or WebKit browser engines as used by Google, Apple, and many open source projects, or perhaps the Gecko engine as used by Firefox. At the top end of the web browser world there are now depressingly few maintained browser engines — we think to the detriment of web standards evolution.

Moving away from the big players though, there are several small browser projects which eschew bells and whistles for speed and compactness, and we’re pleased to see that one of the perennial players has released a new version as it passes its quarter century.

Dillo describes itself as ” a fast and small graphical web browser”, and it provides a basic window on the web with a tiny download and the ability to run on very low-end hardware. Without JavaScript and other luxuries it sometimes doesn’t render a site as you’d see it in Chrome or Firefox, but we’re guessing many users would relish some escape from the web’s cycle-sucking garbage. The new version 3.2.0 brings bug fixes, as well as math formula rendering, and navigation improvements.

The special thing about Dillo is that this is a project which came back from the dead. We reported last year how a developer resurrected it after a previous release back in 2015, and it seems that for now at least it has a healthy future. So put it on your retro PC, your original Raspberry Pi, or your Atari if you have one, and try it on your modern desktop if you need reminding just how fast web browsing can be.

This isn’t the only interesting browser project on the block, we’re also keeping an eye on Ladybird, which is aiming for those big players rather than simplicity like Dillo.

Thanks [Feinfinger] for the tip.

Building A Raycaster Within Bash

January 16, 2025 by 4 Comments

Wolfenstein 3D was a paradigm-shifting piece of software, using raycasting techniques to create a game with pseudo-3D graphics. Now, [izabera] has done something very similar, creating a raycasting display engine that runs entirely within bash.

The work was developed with an eye cast over an existing raycasting tutorial online. As you might imagine, implementing these graphical techniques in a text console proved difficult. The biggest problem [izabera] encountered was that bash is slow. It’s not supposed to display full frames of moving content at 25+ fps. It’s supposed to display text. Making it display graphics by using tons of colorful characters is really pushing the limits. Bash also doesn’t have any ability to work with floating points, so all the calculations are done with massive integers. Other problems involved the limited ways to read the keyboard in bash, and keeping track of the display as a whole.

It’s neat reading about how this was pulled off—specifically because it was hard. It might not be the kind of project you’d ever implement for serious work, but there are learnings to be had here that you won’t get anywhere else. Code is on Github, while there’s a visual storytelling of how it came together on imgur.

We’ve seen similar work before—with magical 3D graphics generated in Microsoft Excel. Will wonders never cease? We hope not, because we always like to see new ones on the tipsline. Keep us busy!

Fighting To Keep Bluetooth Thermometers Hackable

January 16, 2025 by 39 Comments

Back in 2020, we first brought you word of the Xiaomi LYWSD03MMC — a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) temperature and humidity sensor that could be had from the usual sources for just a few dollars each. Capable of being powered by a single CR2032 battery for up to a year, the devices looked extremely promising for DIY smart home projects. There was only one problem, you needed to use Xiaomi’s app to read the data off of the things.

Enter [Aaron Christophel], who created an open source firmware for these units that could easily be flashed using a web-based tool from a smartphone in BLE range and opened up all sorts of advanced features. The firmware started getting popular, and a community developed around it. Everyone was happy. So naturally, years later, Xiaomi wants to put a stop to it.

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Nice PDF, But Can It Run DOOM? Yup!

January 15, 2025 by 12 Comments

DOOM is a classic game to implement on a variety of platforms, but doompdf by [ading2210] is one we didn’t see coming. It runs a bit slow and controls are a little awkward but it does run. Entirely within a PDF file, at that.

How is this possible? PDFs are technically capable of much more than just displaying static content, and support JavaScript with their own library of functions. Adobe Acrobat implements the full spec, but modern web browsers implement at least a subset of the functionality in a sandboxed JavaScript runtime environment. Input and output are limited to things one might expect from a fancy PDF form (text input boxes, clickable buttons, things of that nature) but computation-wise, just about anything goes.

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Procedurally Generated Terrain In OpenSCAD

January 14, 2025 by 21 Comments

We’re big fans of OpenSCAD here at Hackaday — it’s free and open source software, runs on pretty much anything, and the idea of describing objects via code seems like a natural fit for producing functional parts. Rather than clicking and dragging elements on the screen, you can knock out a quick bracket or other simple component with just a few lines of code. But one of the things we don’t often get a chance to showcase is the incredible potential of generating 2D and 3D objects algorithmically.

In a recent Reddit post, [ardvarkmadman] dropped an extremely impressive snippet of OpenSCAD code that he calls TerrainGen. In fewer than fifteen lines of code, it’s able to create randomized “islands” which range from simple plateaus to craggy mountain ranges. After dropping the code in the OpenSCAD editor, you can just keep hitting F5 until you get a result that catches your eye. This seems like an excellent way to generate printable terrain elements for gaming purposes, but that’s just one possibility.

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Bad Apple But It’s 6,500 Regex Searches In Vim

January 11, 2025 by 7 Comments

In the world of showing off, there is alongside ‘Does it play Doom?’ that other classic of ‘Does it play Bad Apple?’. Whereas either would be quaint in the context of the Vim editor, this didn’t deter [Nolen Royalty] from making Vim play the Bad Apple video. As this is a purely black and white video, this means that it’s possible to convert each frame into a collection of pixels, with regular expression based search and custom highlighting allowing each frame to be rendered in the Vim window.

The fun part about this hack is that it doesn’t require any hacking or patching of Vim, but leans on its insane levels of built-in search features by line and column, adjusting the default highlight features and using a square font to get proper pixels rather than rectangles. The font is (unsurprisingly) called Square and targets roguelike games with a specific aesthetic.

First 6,500 frames are fed through ffmpeg to get PNGs, which are converted these into pixel arrays using scripts on the GitHub project. Then the regex search combined with Vim macros allowed the video to be played at real-time speed, albeit at 120 x 90 resolution to give the PC a fighting chance. The highlighting provides the contrast with the unlit pixels, creating a rather nice result as can be seen in the embedded video.

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