Ballmerpeak devblog

Software development, related stuff and others

Make it work 3: Nexus - The Jupiter Incident

September 03, 2019 — Richárd Thier

This post is about making the game in the title run on linux. Might be helpful for anyone who has 3D glitches for this or any other games when played in wine.

Now after I had changed my linux distro to an arch machine I had to reinstall some of my games that I made run well earlier. These were sometimes cases that are much less interesting then disassembling GT97 racing as before so I did not blog about these and sometimes I had no notes on how to make them work.

Now as I redo these things it became visible that it is worth noting this kind of information too because one can easily forget what was the key and thus I can see now that others might be interested in the process too.

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Tags: make-it-work, retro, linux, gaming, wine, nexus, the-jupiter-incident, install, hack, custom, resolution, swiftshader, directx, glitch

The one-and-true productivity recipe

February 27, 2019 — Richárd Thier

There are a lot of books, blogs, courses on productivity and procrastination, but most of them are complete bullshit that never helps. Take this advice from me and I am quite sure if you can only follow this it will surely help!

Th3 pr0 R3C1P3 F0R G3TT1N Th1ngs D0n3:

  1. Go and do work instead of reading stuff on productivity. Whenever you feel you wanna read, do work immediately!

  2. You do not need planning when you already have at least 5 things planned out. You need doing then much more!

  3. It is simple: Real direct work is best, meaningful activities are second best, wasting time with bullshit is least favorable. Develop HABITS for the former, not plans, not magical stuff but HABITS.

  4. and finally: go and work or do something meaningful right now! I am out for running now. ;-)

These are the four golden rules rules of productivity. Everything else is mostly bullshit. Trust me if you need to read hudred pages on the topic you are doomed and that will not help but make it worse!

Tags: productivity, self-management, procrastination, lifehack, simle, pro, hack, l33t, haxor

Make it work 2: GT 97 Racing - "playing" the game

January 19, 2019 — Richárd Thier

After creating the NO-CD version of the game it was time to play some is not it? It started out really hard and after perfecting the game while making it run without any lag... I have found that it is unbeatable on the first level even with a perfect drive!

It seems the internet is also complaining on this: People write on various places that there are versions which are unbeatable and versiouns which are beatable. Instead of finding a right versioun I thought it is best to go and 'play' a bit differently - 'play' with some debuggers and reverse engineering tools.

After all this became a much longer and harder journey than removing the no-cd code. The results are presented in this post, but if you are only interested in downloading the final binaries, scroll down to the posts end!

Also if you just want to see how I removed the CD-checks, look for the earlier post on this very same blog.

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Tags: retro, gaming, dosbox, crack, gtracing, hacking, assembly, debug, hack, linux, cdemu, make-it-work, gt, 97, racing, trainer, fix, patch, bugfix, checkpoint, time, issues, too, little, bonus, no, cd, no-cd, problem, cannot, beat, pwn, h4x00r, hackerman

Make it work: GT97 Racing

January 16, 2019 — Richárd Thier

Once I had this game (GT97 Racing) and now found it in nrg image format so I thought it is time to retroplay a bit with it, to find out sadly that the game does not work because of copy protection complains when trying with the NRG, cdemu, linux, dosbox environment.

The game uses CD checking in a way that does not work when the .nrg image is mounted with cdemu on linux and its drive directory is mounted with dosbox!

This is because the CD is a mixed-mode CD with audio tracks and allegedly the length of the tracks are used as copy protection.

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Tags: retro, gaming, dosbox, crack, gtracing, hacking, assembly, debug, hack, linux, cdemu, make-it-work, gt, 97, racing