Monthly Archives: August 2008

File and Memory Offsets with DOS DEBUG

I often use the DOS DEBUG command to investigate older 16-bit programs; while there are doubtless better tools, DEBUG is ubiquitous and effective. There are many guides to its operation, but here I focus on a specific and practical question: … Continue reading

Posted in Reverse Engineering | Comments Off

JSON Data Formats (Bloxorz)

After writing last week’s post on a Bloxorz solution algorithm, I was inspired to revisit the solver to make it a little more useful. In addition to cleaning up a few minor bugs, I preloaded it with all 33 levels … Continue reading

Posted in Web stuff | Comments Off

Bloxorz/Bloxors

A few months ago I came across a cute little puzzle game called Bloxorz. Inspired by Norvig’s Sudoku solver, I hacked together a JS-based pathfinder for Bloxorz problems. Although the proper spelling of the game’s name continues to frustrate me, … Continue reading

Posted in Projects | Comments Off

1985 Data Structures (Hacker)

Editorial note: I enjoy poking around the innards of old computer games. I think it’s interesting to learn how the things worked, especially since they often had to cope with formidable resource restrictions. This is one of an occasional series … Continue reading

Posted in Reverse Engineering | Comments Off

Working with binary data in JavaScript

I recently needed to manipulate some binary data within JavaScript; my data stream was represented as a series of bytes, and I needed to extract floating point numbers from it. There were some existing solutions available on the Internet, but … Continue reading

Posted in Projects | Comments Off