GTA V Mod Shows (And Cheats) Those Stunt Jump Hoops

August 21, 2020 by Sven Gregori No comments

While the recent announcement of Grand Theft Auto V for the upcoming next-generation game consoles was a disappointment for those fervently waiting for a successor in the infamous video game series, it shows that after almost seven years of its initial release, the epic title is still going strong — and rightfully so. But a game as varied and complex as GTA V isn’t without some quirks, especially if you’re going for 100% completeness.

The stunt jumps seem a particular pesky nut to crack here, so [Anthony Som] made it his mission to shed some light on what qualifies as a successful jump by reverse engineering the system and writing both a mod for displaying the landing zone and a cheat to instant success.

If you’re not familiar with the game, its vast open world map features a variety of side quests, one of them being stunt jumps, where certain locations allow you to launch the vehicle you’re driving into the air in hopes to land on an adjacent road or area — whether to evade the people chasing you, or just for fun. There’s no telling how to actually succeed though, the game just tells you if you did or not afterwards, causing some degree of frustration. As an avid speedrunner (as in finishing a game in the shortest possible time), [Anthony] was looking for a way to increase the success rate for those stunt jumps, and decided to dig into the code to find out how to get there. Of course, being a proprietary game, he had to resort to reverse engineering and utilizing GTA’s vivid modding scene to do so.

His initial outcome was a mod that displays the launch and landing area as rectangles inside the game itself, which was a great help. But well, after already getting that far, [Anthony] figured he might as well continue and add a cheat mode to teleport the car right inside that expected landing area and be done with second-guessing his attempts once and for all.

If you’re curious about modding GTA yourself, his write-up has a few good pointers for that, and of course features some real examples of it. Whether this is a good idea for the self-driving AI that uses GTA as learning environment is probably a different story though.

Exotic Device Gets Linux Support Via Wireshark And Rust

August 20, 2020 by Sven Gregori 10 Comments

What can you do if you have a nice piece of hardware that kinda works out of the box, but doesn’t have support for your operating system to get the full functionality out of it? [Harry Gill] found himself in such a situation with a new all-in-one (AIO) water cooling system. It didn’t technically require any operating system interaction to perform its main task, but things like settings adjustments or reading back statistics were only possible with Windows. He thought it would be nice to have those features in Linux as well, and as the communication is done via USB, figured the obvious solution is to reverse engineer the protocol and simply replicate it.

His first step was to set up a dual boot system (his attempts at running the software in a VM didn’t go very well) which allowed him to capture the USB traffic with Wireshark and USBPcap. Then it would simply be a matter of analyzing the captures and writing some Linux software to make sense of the data. The go-to library for USB tasks would be libusb, which has bindings for plenty of languages, but as an avid Rust user, that choice was never really an issue anyway.

How to actually make use of the captured data was an entirely different story though, and without documentation or much help from the vendor, [Harry] resorted to good old trial and error to find out which byte does what. Eventually he succeeded and was able to get the additional features he wanted supported in Linux — check out the final code in the GitHub repository if you’re curious what this looks like in Rust.

Capturing the USB communication with Wireshark seems generally a great way to port unsupported features to Linux, as we’ve seen earlier with an RGB keyboard and the VGA frame grabber that inspired it. If you want to dig deeper into the subject, [Harry] listed a few resources regarding USB in general, but there’s plenty more to explore with reverse engineering USB.

Share Your Clipboard Across Machines Using MQTT

August 18, 2020 by Danie Conradie 21 Comments

Many of us regularly move from one computer to another for work, play, and hacking; every now and then finding yourself wishing you could copy something on one machine and paste on another without additional steps in between. [Ayan Pahwa] was well acquainted with this frustration, so he created AnywhereDoor, a cross-platform clipboard sharing utility that uses MQTT.

Some cloud-based solutions already exist to do this, but that means sending your private clipboard data to someone else’s server. Not keen on that idea, [Ayan]’s solution makes use of a MQTT broker that can run anywhere on the local network, and lightweight python clients to run on Mac, Windows and Linux. The client checks your clipboard at specified intervals, and publishes new data to a topic on the broker, to which all the clients are subscribed. The data is end-to-end encrypted using Fernet symmetrical key encryption, so the data won’t be readable to anyone else on the network. Currently, AnywhereDoor only supports copying text, but media is planned for a future version.

We like the relative simplicity of the utility, and see it being very handy for hackers bouncing between machines in the lab. Simple software utilities that solve a specific and real problem can are very useful, like a wiring documentation tool, or Kicad to isolation routing patchwork converter.

Get Your SQL Statements Right The First Time With SQL Lint

August 18, 2020 by Sven Gregori 11 Comments

What’s your average success rate of getting a SQL statement right on the first try? In best case, you botched a simple statement without side effects and just have to try again with correct syntax or remove that typo from a table name, but things can easily go wrong fast here. But don’t worry, the days of fixing it on the fly can be over, thanks to [Joe Reynolds] who wrote a linter for SQL.

A linter parses code to tell you where you screwed up. While checking SQL syntax itself is somewhat straightforward, [Joe]’s sql-lint tool will also check the semantics of it by looking up the actual database and performing sanity checks on it. Currently supporting PostgreSQL and MySQL, it can be either run on a single SQL file or a directory of files, or take input directly from the command line. Even better, it also integrates within your editor of choice — assuming it supports external plugins — and the documentation shows how to do that specifically for Vim.

If you can look past the fact that it’s written in TypeScript and consequentially results in a rather large executable (~40 MB), it might serve as an interesting starting point for the language itself, or adds a new perspective on writing this type of analyzer. And if databases aren’t your terrain, how about shell scripts?

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Fitting Snake Into A QR Code

August 17, 2020 by Danie Conradie 18 Comments

QR codes are usually associated with ASCII text like URLs or serial numbers, but did you know you can also encode binary data into them? To demonstrate this concept, [MattKC] embarked on a journey to create a QR code that holds an executable version of Snake. Video after the break.

As you might expect, the version 40 QR code he ended up using is much larger than the ones you normally see. Consisting of a 171 by 171 grid, it’s the largest version that can still be read by most software. This gave [MattKC] a whopping 2,953 bytes to work with. Not a lot of space, but still bigger than some classic video games of the past.

To start, he first wrote Snake to run in a web browser using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which was able to fit in the available space. Modern browsers do a lot of the lifting with built-in features, and [MattKC] wanted more of a challenge, so he decided to instead create a Windows executable file. His first attempts with compiled C code were too large, which led down the rabbit trail of x86 Assembly. Here he found that his knowledge of Assembly was too limited to create a small enough program without investing months into the project. He went back to C and managed to compress his executable using Crinkler, a compressing linker commonly used in the demoscene. This shrunk the file down to 1,478 bytes.

Zbar, a command-line barcode reader for Windows was used to test the final Snake QR code. [MattKC] discovered a bug in Zbarcam that prevented it from reading binary data via a webcam input, so through the power of open source, he submitted a bug fix which is now integrated into the official release.

All the files are available for anyone to play with on [MattKC]’s website. The video below goes into a lot of detail on the entire journey. Since this project proves software can be embedded in QR codes, it means that malware could also be hidden in a QR code, if there is an exploitable bug somewhere in a smartphone QR reader app.

QR codes are an interesting tool with a variety of uses. Take a deep dive into how they work, generate a 3D printable version, or build a QR jukebox, if you want to learn more.

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3D On The ZX Spectrum 48K

August 17, 2020 by Inderpreet Singh 16 Comments

There are times when a project becomes such a big part of a maker’s life that they find themselves revisiting it even years later. [Thanassis] combined this phenomena with his love for the ZX Spectrum when he ported one of his old 3D rendering projects to the ZX Spectrum 48K. The video below shows the result, and they speak for themselves.

The roots of this project go back around three years, when [Thanassis] posted a similar project for the ATMega328 which employed fixed point math tricks for achieving the graphics. The code needed to be even tighter to run on the Spectrum, eventually getting boiled down to just a handful of calculations. This got the proof of concept working with the z88dk compiler, but it wasn’t quite fast enough.

In the end, hand assembly optimizations nearly doubled the performance to a blistering 10 frames per second. There’s also a version that kicks it all the way up to 40 FPS, but only if you give it a few minutes to do the calculations ahead of time. With a few teaks and the right display, this project could produce some very cool retro visuals.

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GridSound – An Audio Workstation In Your Browser

August 17, 2020 by Sven Gregori 10 Comments

If you’re into creating music, you’ll have a surprisingly large variety of open source options at your disposal, ranging from Audacity as rather simple audio editor to Ardour as a full-blown, studio-worthy DAW — and LMMS, Rosegarden, MusE etc. for anything in between. With [Thomas Tortorini]’s GridSound project, you’ll have one additional choice on your list now, except this one runs in your browser. So if you find yourself in a sudden moment of inspiration, all you’ll need is a browser and off you go.

From the feature set’s point of view, GridSound leans towards LMMS and offers a drum kit, piano roll, and synthesizer. It appears that you won’t be able to record real world instruments at this point, but it’s also a work in progress, so who knows what the future will bring. The code is available on GitHub and you can explore GridSound itself here — no login required, unless you want to save your work. Running in a browser, GridSound is naturally written in JavaScript and uses the Web Audio API to perform the actual audio tasks.

What’s impressive is that [Thomas] opted against any UI framework-of-the-week, but instead implemented everything from scratch in pure vanilla JavaScript. In fact, the entire code base seems to be self-contained without any third party dependencies, and that alone deserves some respect. Sure, JavaScript isn’t everybody’s cup of tea — “real developers use assembly” — so if you prefer something more physical, how about some cardboard music?