andrew_bidlaw

andrew_bidlaw, 1 year ago

As I understand it, it has lax checks if all disks are original. Some games required many, Pt.1 was on one, Pt.2 was on another, and a memory card sewed this monstrosity together whenever you switch disks - as it had no HDD, no install options.

Designing a game around that was hard and probably meant frequent checks, delays, and also a player having incomplete game if only one disk is missing or scratched if they want to play again - and you swapped them back and forth. So that dev implemented zero-check on a second disc after the first one is checked, a command to kill a game and start anew, and with that you can put whatever you burnt on your CD, leaving the console clueless it’s not your actual disk 2. It still needs you to boot with original Aliens first and put code, so it’s not exactly stealing anything directly, but oh god it’s an interesting vulnerability.

I haven’t heard of something akin to that, besides weird cartridge combos on old consoles where you put one into another or other heresy like plug-in cartridge readers, hardware extenders, etc. It seems Sony was convinced the first check is there, and it’s ok, but never thought you can abuse it up that great, and had no further investigation was put.

For a console that aged, that had hardware jailbreaks and emulators for years, I don’t feel they’d hurt him now. Twenty years is too much even for them. They’d still sell mini-PS1 without any problem as it has no disk reading capabilities and won’t care.

andrew_bidlaw, 1 year ago

I get it. It’s just I don’t see any dev-put images in many big apps, besides a logo and a welcome screen. Updating them with dozens of megabytes doesn’t feel okay. It seems like there’s some bloat, or a vault management problems. Like in some seasonally updated games that put dupes to speed up load of a map or easily add new content on top of them instead of redownloading a brand new db. Some I followed shawed off tens of gigabytes by rearranging stuff.

Like, messengers. I don’t get it how Viber wants more than 40+ mb per update having nothing but stickers, emoji already installed and probably don’t change them much. Cheap wireless connection could allow them to ignore that for some reason and start to get heavier in order to offload some from their servers, for many images are localized. Is that probably what their updates are? Or they consequentially add beta patches after an approval, so you download a couple of them in a close succession after they get into public?