In registry "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout"
Create Binary value named "Scancode Map"
Put in there: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 3E 00 5F E0 00 00 00 00
That changes scancode E05F (Sleep key) into scancode 3E (F4 key).
Then logout or reboot for the change to apply. I actually looked up what would be necessary to do this change without a reboot, and it turns out that only WinLogon.exe is allowed to make the Scancode Map change.
A tool to help manage these kinds of rebindings is the Keyboard Manager in PowerToys.
As I recall it uses multiple approaches, so it isn't "just" a straight manager of scancode maps, but that also helps it avoid logout/reboot for the initial change to take place.
If you put tape on cartridge pin #14 of NES Platoon (or other bad connection), the game will boot to a glitched version of the ending, thus making it a zero-second speedrun.
Pin #14 is the CPU R/W pin, and if it's not properly connected, the game will be unable to write to the MMC1 mapper to perform bank switching. Platoon happens to be programmed in a way that address 0x8000 of every bank is an entry point that will run a particular level from the game. So you boot up the game, and it tries to switch to the Title Screen bank, then jumps to 0x8000. But the bank switch fails, and instead it runs code from the first bank. It just so happens that the first bank contains the program for the ending.
If the cartridge connection improves and mapper writes start to succeed, the graphics will return to normal as it continues to run the ending.
This was the technique used by American Dad speedrunners. Unfortunately, speedrun.com banned it after years of controversy, since fast-forwarding videos doesn't count as a speedrun.
This comment is how I find out there was a Platoon game based on the movie. Legit hilarious, and for a movie tie in game it doesn't look half bad! Like a mixture of Contra + those dungeon explorer RPGs around the time too:
There is one hard wall that stops very old clients from connecting: Not supporting a new enough version of TLS. TLS 1.2 is from 2008, and TLS 1.3 is from 2018. Web browsers older than 2008 can't connect to modern websites since TLS 1.0 and 1.1 were deprecated from web servers in 2021.
I still think it's worth it to provide connections over plain HTTP for this reason. It probably doesn't apply to many people, and you shouldn't allow anything really important to happen over plain HTTP (logins, payment), but normal viewing should still be possible.
Sadly, the internet as a whole seems to disagree. Even the most useful resource on the web one could use over plain HTTP, Wikipedia, only allows connections over HTTPS. I guess it kind of made sense as part of the campaign to push the internet as a whole over to HTTPS, but anyone who's connecting to any website over normal HTTP these days is doing so because they literally can't use HTTPS.
I agree; you should allow non-TLS connections as well as TLS. (At least, access that does not require authentication should not require TLS, but should still allow it if that is what the client wants.)
If you are concerned about accidental login or API keys without TLS, then you can consider supporting mutual TLS, which improves security (and flexibility) in other ways as well. (You do not necessarily, have to require mutual TLS, in case someone prefers to use a username/password login, or 2FA or something else like that instead.) (In the case of login forms, you can have the links to the login forms to always use HTTPS, in order to avoid the problem.)
Reportedly, the only location to store textures for quick GPU read access was a whole 4 KB in size. What an, apparently, dumb mistake. The blur was bad.
Yeah that 4KB also had to hold the MIP maps as well, effectively halving that down to 2KB for the full size and then 2KB for all the down scaled pieces.
Ps1 also only had a 4KB cache but it could also dynamically manage it for larger textures but that came with a large performance penalty.
The blur on N64 was a combination of that and small cartridge size. It graphics setup did have some advantages, look at Mario 64 for example. The hills in the distance are usually just a few polygons with some low resolution textures stretched over them. The filtering and perspective correction means it is a very consistent image, you would not be able to do that on PS1 without it becoming a visual mess.
PS1 affine rendering was fast but limited, which for the release window was good enough.
Will we ever see a Windows-optimized version of unix utilities that avoids creating new processes? It seems like that's the step that's really slow, and if you could reuse a process to continue running more commands, that would speed things up a lot.
Shred isn't very useful on SSDs in general. Because of TRIM, deleting a file instantly makes the sectors read back as 00 bytes. (Yes the data is technically still on the flash chips scattered across memory blocks without any mapping telling you where each piece of the data is, but is not readable through normal drive commands)
UTF-16 is also used by C#, Java, and JavaScript. Since JavaScript is so widely adopted, I wouldn't call it a rare bird. Not necessarily used when reading or writing files, but it's what's used internally for the strings. As a result, your strings use UTF-16 surrogate pairs to represent characters outside of the basic multilingual plane (such as Emoji).
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