I have an upcoming article on Pixter itself which includes giving them a LOT of credit for cost cutting. There are some quite clever things there. I also worked out how to dump games (not easy with those damn melody chips, or what did you call them?) and will release an archive of all games and working emulators.
Nice work Dmitry, looking forward to read your next article.
The later model Pixter Multimedia had the full memory space accessible via JTAG, which is how some carts and even boot ROM got dumped a while ago [1], is it the same deal with Pixter Color?
That OpenOCD script was a bit flaky, and sometimes the boot ROM would be already unloaded before reading, maybe you have some insights in how to make it more robust.
btw, have you looked into the original Pixter? The cart connector seems to have a very narrow bus, so it doesn't look like those carts have code, and probably can only be dumped with a decap.
That only dumps the data. That’s the easy part. None of that dumps the melodies.
The pin outs that page links to are also not quite accurate. I need to finish editing my other article on this.
I have indeed looked into the original Pixter. Deeply: I have decoded the bus, documented the device, dumped games, and produced a working emulator.
The cartridges do contain memory. Most of them are about 1 MB in size, split between code (the maximum for which is 32 kB) and audio effects + images which occupy the rest of the space. If you are very, very curious and don’t want to wait for me to finish my editing, email me and I can explain how it works.
Possible user-space DoS on Linux when running on an ARM7 CPU in just two instructions. Would that be a record? If the kernel was configured to support OABI (exclusively or together with EABI), I think the following two-ARM-instr binary will simply crash the kernel if the core has alignment checking: SUB PC, PC, #2; SWI 0. I am not sure how common such configs are, but someone should maybe fix that? The fix would be only one extra instruction.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2024/12/4/503 states that OABI support is quite obscure these days and will probably be outright unbuildable at some time in the future, but what you've found still qualifies as a (likely minor) security issue that should be properly reported as such. The kernel page on security reporting is https://docs.kernel.org/process/security-bugs.html
Hai there, kernel guys. Now... assuming you first rob a museum for a working ARM7TDMI-based board, then find a way to flash it with a kernel and a rootfs to boot it, and if your kernel has an obscure and not-used-anymore ABI enabled, and you then somehow give an untrusted party ability to run code on it, they could crash the kernel using this 8-byte userspace binary.
:)
It is academically cool, no more. Quite possibly some old industrial control stuff is still running on old ARM7 boards with OABI enabled, but (i hope) they are not exposed to third party code. I guess I could send in the one line patch, if i find the time. The fix is quite trivial, funnily enough. You simply mask off the bottom 2 bits instead of assuming that LR in ARM mode is 4-byte-aligned, since on ARM7 it might not be
6502 can do it in one. 12 opcodes are glitched in a way that permanently halts the CPU, by causing it to never reset the internal tick counter (...sortof) that starts the next instruction. Recovery is only possible with a power cycle.
If you needed to ask the permission of every apparatchik in the world before you said anything online, you wouldn't even be allowed to say "no comment". Glad someone is fighting this and doing so publicly. And the GRANITE act looks interesting: https://prestonbyrne.com/2025/10/18/the-granite-act-how-cong...
A country may vet entrants according to any criteria it chooses, just like I may enforce any limits I wish unto who may enter my house. If the criteria are too egregious for the gain the applicants might get by being in that country, the talented immigrants who have options may go elsewhere and the country may need relax the criteria to recapture the market for bright minds.
> A country may vet entrants according to any criteria it chooses…
Sure. But said country may have set rules for itself, like the First Amendment, that limit what's permissible beyond what international law and sovereignty alone permit.
(To extend the house analogy, you may not actually be able to "enforce any limits I wish unto who may enter my house". It is, for example, generally unlawful for you to evict your minor child. If you rent out a room, that tenant has rights you can't violate, too. You can't keep out a cop with a valid warrant, either.)
I don't think anyone would argue with that - the problem here is that the requirements are being changed thru a process that involves no public or congressional input.
The other issue is that the vetting will likely not just look for terroristic or other 'illegal' social media content - it will look for whatever the administration decides to look for - again without oversight.
Meaningless. You are implying that unless someone is elected with 100% of votes, they do not represent the People?
> policies being put in place were not what was promised.
Again meaningless. Did Trump make promises specifically to not increase stringency of immigration law? He was elected to make decisions on behalf of the electorate.
> Which Americans do you mean specifically? And which abuse? That's not specific enough.
The Americans who elected the current President. Abuse by by companies and individuals defrauding American workers and taxpayers, while the government does nothing to combat it. The abuse by the government allowing millions of immigrants per year to the detriment of Americans (speaking of "not what was promised", the 1965 INA).
My point is that the majority of the country is against what Trump and his racist collaborators are doing. Personally, I think racism is bad.
> Abuse by by companies and individuals defrauding American workers and taxpayers, while the government does nothing to combat it
I don't think this is quite correct, but I do agree companies should not by able to abuse immigration law to abuse immigrants for cheap and/or pliant labor. Workers rights should be upheld universally and our country should invest in narrowing our insane wealth gap.
This is a silly comment. The legality isn't really in question. It's whether or not it's a good idea. And citizens of a country will debate whether it's a good idea or not. If we citizens decide it's a bad idea, we'll vote out the government currently in power.
Countries have that right, and people have the right to criticize them for their policies and agitate to change them. This is a concept known as “politics”.
If companies were looking for talent, 80% of H1B’s wouldn’t be from India, but from a much more diverse set of countries.
The fact is that India culture is much more so subservient, willing to work more for less pay, won’t unionize, don’t follow major US/Euro holidays, don’t care about work/life balance..etc. Like it or not, it’s nothing more than exploitation as cattle to increase bottom line and sold as increased output.
India is also very nepotistic and it might well be Indian managers already present in the US pushing for entry of their relatives, schoolmates and friends.
No no, your observation is that a large amount of (per your assessment) low-quality people are already being brought in.
This is completely unrelated to the question of whether the highest quality people are being brought in.
By analogy: "New York City doesn't have a lot of the greatest restaurants in the country because 90% of the restaurants in New York City are not that great."
It's just logically invalid.
And divorced from reality. There's a reason the top students in the world overwhelmingly come to study in the US (at least up until recently). The US's dominance on this and its downstream effects is absolutely unambiguous and it's frankly silly to suggest otherwise.
"We also have a lot of underqualified Indian H1Bs" is completely irrelevant.
San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York completely, absolutely, and unquestionably fixed high priced housing by making it effectively subsidized via rent control. It totally worked. There are no problems with the system at all, there are no vacant units being held by owners who fear the results of rent control and inability to actually engage in capitalism. Groceries will be an equal success.
Government involvement by distorting markets always fixes everything.
Germany, for example has rent controls, this is generally a great success, but in Berlin it’s a total disaster.
The contention that it “doesn’t work” in LA and NYC doesn’t really tell us anything useful about groceries.
What you also seem to miss is that government intervention in markets is actually the norm, not the exception, they just don’t normally intervene in ways that get sensationalised by the press.
Not in America. In America, lack of government intervention is the norm. Which is probably why almost all the large companies in the world and most successful startups are here and not in Europe. Also probably why the standard of living is significantly higher here.
Yes! As long as we don't confuse "Standard of Living" with "Quality of Life " - all the money in the world won't help with the results of eating a bad diet, all too often. For example, what's up with the overeating that results in obesity, diabetes and heart disease (all of which correlate with later cognitive decline) - then we need to inject peptides for curbing appetite? Sure, huge industry, big profits, trillion dollar stock valuations - big Standard of Living! But it's kind of "bass ackwards" - simply improving dietary habits could save us all a boatload of money and prevent completely avoidable lifestyle diseases. Sorry if this is "doomer" stuff - but there's an easy way out, and it can be fun, and good for the wallet.
It’s very effective: people with previously unrented units will obviously decide to rent them out at, legally, at exactly 160% of the FMR rates, thus making lots of new housing available. FMR rates can be easily found here:
And the fact that it’s impossible to predict the law more than one month in advance will guarantee success!
Hah, did anyone fall for that? I know people who were about to move out of LA County, rent somewhere cheaper, and rent out their house to a family that needed it, except that 160% of FMR is utterly, hilariously below market in LA’s housing emergency and isn’t really enough to make the whole housing swap worthwhile, so their house is not actually available to rent. Good job, LA.
P.S. If one could instantly get a permit to rebuild a modern house on the site of one’s burnt-down house, then the housing emergency might resolve faster.
> Government involvement by distorting markets always fixes everything
If you sarcasm this broad: Letting the market run free destroys everything. Here's my evidence: broken atmosphere (CO2), broken ecosystems, poisoned rivers, lakes and fields, lots of people still struggling to pay for basic necessities. What's yours?
I struggled in vain to see what this has to do with rust. The answer is nothing other than the 4 lines of sample code shown are in Rust. The actually useful nugget of knowledge contained therein (one can create ICMP packets without being root on MacOS or Linux) is language agnostic.
So... why? Should I now add "in C" or "in assembly" to the end of all my article titles?
It's a lot more than 4 lines of sample code, in fact on my screen, it looks like it's more code than text. This is closer to a Rust tutorial then a low-level networking explainer, so yeah, it makes sense to say "in Rust". If I wanted to do this in C, this would not be the best resource.
Yeah it would definitely be a good idea for the assembly ones. Maybe not C since C has kind of been the de facto language for this stuff for decades so it's implied.
Agreed. I don't dislike Rust as a language, but it annoys me how its practitioners add the "[written] in Rust" tagline to every single thing they do that's otherwise unrelated to Rust. Specially when their code or dependencies are full of unverified unsafe blocks, which defeats the selling point.
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