Tuesday 12 October 2010

Emulation resources

I just noticed that my bookmarks are beginning to get pretty substantial, and most of them are resources related to emulation. I've been far and wide on the net looking for documentation so I'll post them here. I hope someone finds them useful, or even just interesting.

Nes 
(Too many links to post here, i'll post the important ones, you can find Nes docs easy anyway)
NES nocash docs
6502 reference

Super Nintendo
Programming the 65816
Snes programming tutorial
Snes graphics documentation

GB/GBA/DS
GBA & DS NO$ Docs GBATEK
GBA_11.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Tonc: Whirlwind Tour of ARM Assembly
ARM ASSEMBLER PROGRAMMING; tutorial, resources, and examples
ARM7TDMI Tech manual
ARM7TDMI data sheet
CowBite Virtual Harware Spec
GBA Game development
GB/GBC Specs
Game dev
ARM Instruction Formats and Timings

Playstation 1
Everything you ever wanted.. (html)
Everything you ever wanted.. (pdf)

Playstation 2
Inside the Playstation 2: PS2 Architecture, Graphics Rendering and Programming
Procedural Rendering on Playstation
An Introduction to PS2DEV « Lukasz.dk
PlayStation 2 Architecture (pdf)  (takes ages to load)
A Technical Overview of the Emotion Engine
PS2 Basics
PS2IOP
PS2BMP1.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Win32 PS2 Dev. Intro
Downloads - GSHI
MIPS Assembly
VPU Thesis (pdf) 

Nintendo 64
RCP64, Nintendo 64 Machine
Nintendo 64 Specifications
http://infrid.com/rcp64/docfiles/n64maps.txt
Nintendo 64 Tech
Nintendo64 Technical Information...

Misc
Sanity Warning 
HUGE emulator list and sources etc
NO$FUN (All NO$ docs)

 Peace

Sunday 10 October 2010

Be careful what you click!

This is not related  to emulation, but I feel that it's something that needs to be said. I think that Microsoft should do something about this huge weakness I have found in their operating system!

I hate viruses, most of us do, which is why I thought I'd have a try at writing one... just to see how easy it was for people to write malicious software. Turns out, it is very easy with just some basic coding knowledge.

In my opinion, the most destructive malware would be malware that deletes information from your computer, and what better information to delete from your computer than the Master Boot Record. For those who don't know what the MBR is, it is a small peice of code (512 bytes) that lies at sector 0 of your boot disk. This is the sector that the BIOS loads into memory for immediate execution after the post screen. It essentially boots up your operating system and usually loads the kernel and jumps to it. Without a valid Master Boot Record, your entire operating system is useless, removing the MBR effectively renders your OS useless, and unbootable.

However, there are steps you can take to repair your MBR, infact, it's very easy in modern operating systems like Vista or Windows 7. You just insert the Windows 7 system disk, and repair your operating system, however, if you do not know how to do this, or you have an older OS like XP, you are pretty screwed.

Which brings me on to this software I wrote. The virus I wrote (which I will never be using maliciously of course), replaces your MBR with my own custom MBR, which prints a little message to the screen instead of loading your OS. Keep in mind that I have created a few safe guards to make sure that I didn't click it by accident, I created some "Are you sure" messageboxes just to be safe, but if I took these away, this software would be very dangerous.

The executable needs to be run as adminstrator, but this is hardly much of a safe guard, as most users would probably be logged on as admin anyway.

I won't release this software or source code for now, unless anyone specifically asks for it, because there is always the chance that it could be used maliciously. It is however a very small file, and the source is very small, so be careful what you click.. or you might just get your MBR deleted. The Windows 7 and Vista UAC doesn't seem like such a bad thing to me anymore...

Saturday 9 October 2010

PS2 Development

For ages now, I've wanted to develop my own programs/games for the PS2, and up untill today, I've had no luck in finding a straight forward, up to date enough tutorial. For anyone interested in PS2 dev, I would highly recommened this guide, and the pre-compiled PS2SDK mentioned in the tutorial, from here.

You can use the PCSX2 to run the resulting ELF files, on the file menu, "Open ELF file". 

Well, that's about all I have to say about that, I will be hopefully posting updates on my own emulators, although I have so much left to do.

Peace