Tag: game

MAME Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary

After years of work, a fan has finally completed a MAME version of Atari’s unreleased game Primal Rage II this week, one more example of the emulator preserving digital history. Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes MAME.net: Way back in 1997, Nicola Salmoria merged a few stand-alone arcade machine emulators into the first Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Could he have possibly imagined the significance of what he’d built? Over the past two decades, MAME has brought together over a thousand contributors to build a system that emulates more machines than any other program. But MAME is more than that: MAME represents the idea that our digital heritage is important and should be preserved for future generations. MAME strives to accurately represent original systems, allowing unmodified software to run as intended. Today, MAME documents over thirty thousand systems, and usably emulates over ten thousand. MAME meets the definitions of Open Source and Free Software, and works with Windows, macOS, Linux and BSD running on any CPU from x86-64 to ARM to IBM zSeries. A 20th-anniversary blog post thanked MAME’s 1, 600 contributors — more than triple the number after its 10th anniversary — and also thanks MAME’s uncredited contributors. “if you’ve filed a bug report, distributed binaries, run a community site, or just put in a good word for MAME, we appreciate it.” I’ve seen MAME resurrect everything from a rare East German arcade game to a Sonic the Hedgehog popcorn machine. Anybody else have a favorite MAME experience to share? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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MAME Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary

Denuvo forgets to secure server, leaks years of e-mails from game makers

Enlarge The developers at Denuvo have been in the news thanks to cracks  against their notoriously tough digital rights management (DRM) tools , which are normally used to lock down video games from leaking online. On Sunday, the company faced a different kind of crack—not against a high-profile video game, however, but of its depository of private web-form messages. A significant number of these appear to come from game makers, with many requesting information about applying Denuvo’s DRM to upcoming games. The first proof of this leak appears to come from imageboard site 4chan, where an anonymous user posted a link to a log file hosted at the denuvo.com domain. This 11MB file (still online as of press time) apparently contains messages submitted via Denuvo’s public contact form dating back to April 25, 2014. In fact, much of Denuvo’s web database content appears to be entirely unsecured, with root directories for “fileadmin” and “logs” sitting in the open right now. Combing the log file brings up countless spam messages, along with complaints, confused “why won’t this game work” queries from apparent pirates, and even threats (an example: “for what you did to arkham knight I will find you and I will kill you and all of your loved ones, this I promise you CEO of this SHIT drm”). But since Denuvo’s contact page does not contain a link to a private e-mail address—only a contact form and a phone number to the company’s Austrian headquarters—the form appears to also have been used by many game developers and publishers. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Denuvo forgets to secure server, leaks years of e-mails from game makers

How to Live Stream Super Bowl 51 on Any Device, Even If You Don’t Have Cable

It’s Super Bowl weekend, which means snacks, beer and, of course, football. If you don’t have cable and you want to stream the game on you might be wondering how to stream the game. Not to worry—we’ve got you covered. Read more…

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How to Live Stream Super Bowl 51 on Any Device, Even If You Don’t Have Cable

GitLab.com Melts Down After Wrong Directory Deleted, Backups Fail

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Source-code hub Gitlab.com is in meltdown after experiencing data loss as a result of what it has suddenly discovered are ineffectual backups. On Tuesday evening, Pacific Time, the startup issued the sobering series of tweets, starting with “We are performing emergency database maintenance, GitLab.com will be taken offline” and ending with “We accidentally deleted production data and might have to restore from backup. Google Doc with live notes [link].” Behind the scenes, a tired sysadmin, working late at night in the Netherlands, had accidentally deleted a directory on the wrong server during a frustrating database replication process: he wiped a folder containing 300GB of live production data that was due to be replicated. Just 4.5GB remained by the time he canceled the rm -rf command. The last potentially viable backup was taken six hours beforehand. That Google Doc mentioned in the last tweet notes: “This incident affected the database (including issues and merge requests) but not the git repos (repositories and wikis).” So some solace there for users because not all is lost. But the document concludes with the following: “So in other words, out of 5 backup/replication techniques deployed none are working reliably or set up in the first place.” At the time of writing, GitLab says it has no estimated restore time but is working to restore from a staging server that may be “without webhooks” but is “the only available snapshot.” That source is six hours old, so there will be some data loss. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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GitLab.com Melts Down After Wrong Directory Deleted, Backups Fail

‘Donkey Kong 64’ player finds rare collectible 17 years later

The 3D platformer Donkey Kong 64 was lauded for its expansive worlds and multitude of well-hidden collectibles when it launched on the Nintendo 64 in 1999. Like many games of the era, it has enjoyed a peculiar afterlife as speedrunners blitz through it in record time under various conditions, like picking up each of the 976 banana coins found within. Unfortunately, all those completionist runs now seem to be invalid: 17 years after the game came out, streamer Isotarge has found a 977th coin. Turns out the collectible was hidden underground in the game’s fifth level, Fungi Forest, but the telltale patch of dirt indicating buried treasure in the game was hidden by a patch of tall grass. Isotarge was examining save data for that stage and discovered that the information for a particular pickup, rainbow coins, was incomplete. Using analysis tools, they pinpointed its location and unearthed it. While Isotarge is no stranger to using glitches to find out-of-bounds items likely leftover by developers, this particular coin is in fair territory and can be plucked from the ground using an ordinary character move. @Znernicus yes, times have been removed in All Collectables, 949 banana coins (now 974), Fungi coins, DK coins, All Rainbow Coins — Bismuth

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‘Donkey Kong 64’ player finds rare collectible 17 years later

Resident Evil 7’s Denuvo protections cracked in under a week

Enlarge / Imagine these in-game bars are Denuvo copy protection, and CPY is the shotgun that can bust open the lock. A cracked PC version of Denuvo-protected Resident Evil 7 appeared online over the weekend, offered up by hacking collective CPY less than a week after its January 24 release. The crack marks a new low-water mark for the effectiveness of Denuvo’s DRM protection, which just a year ago was considered so unbreakable that major cracking group 3DM took a public break from even attempting to crack Denuvo-protected games. Since then, though, over 20 Denuvo-protected games have been cracked or bypassed by 3DM, CPY, and other groups, starting with Doom and Rise of the Tomb Raider last summer . The Resident Evil 7 crack, in particular, is notable for how quickly it came after the game’s legitimate release. Denuvo copy-protection relies on specific triggers inserted into the executable game code, and those triggers are placed differently in each protected game. This makes it hard to release any sort of generalized tool that will quickly crack all Denuvo-protected games. Instead, the Denuvo cracking process can require a lot of nitty-gritty manual searching through game data for each individual title. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Resident Evil 7’s Denuvo protections cracked in under a week

How a robot got Super Mario 64 and Portal “running” on an SNES

If you missed it live, watch TASBot’s AGDQ 2017 run then read about it below. Can you really, playably emulate games like Super Mario 64 and Portal on a stock standard SNES only by hacking in through the controller ports? The answer is still no, but for a brief moment at this week’s Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) speedrunning marathon, it certainly looked like the impossible finally became possible. For years now , AGDQ has featured a block where TASBot (the Tool-Assisted Speedrun Robot) performs literally superhuman feats on classic consoles simply by sending data through the controller ports thousands of times per second. This year’s block (viewable above) started off simply enough, with some show-offy perfect play of Galaga and Gradius on the new NES Classic hardware (a system that TASbot organizer Allan Cecil says is “absolutely horrible” when it comes to automation). After that, TASBot moved on to a few “total control runs,” exploiting known glitches in Super Mario Bros. 3 and Mega Man to insert arbitrary code on the NES. This is nothing new for the computer-driven TASBot —the basics of the tricks vary by game, but they generally involve using buffer overflows to get into memory, then bootstrapping a loader that starts reading and executing a stream of controller inputs as raw assembly level opcodes. The method was taken to ridiculous extremes last year, when TASbot managed to “beat” Super Mario Bros. 3 in less than a second with a very specific total control glitch. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How a robot got Super Mario 64 and Portal “running” on an SNES

‘Final Fantasy XV’ out-of-bounds glitch reveals an unused open world

The world of Final Fantasy XV feels enormous, stretching out for miles across freeways, plains, lakes and mountains — but in the game’s closing act, that open world becomes incredibly linear. Instead of taking a road trip across a fantastic land, players in the third act can merely look out upon one. A newly discovered out-of-bounds glitch changes that, revealing a surprisingly fleshed out landscape with a frozen tundra, beaches, towns and a vast savannah. There’s not much to do in the area, but fans are now wondering if its a hint at what’s coming for the game’s DLC. Breaking out of the game’s linear section takes a little bit of doing . To start, players have to be running the version of the game that came on retail discs without any updates — then they must reach a train station in a late section of the game. From there, a few careful jumps can land the player outside of their linear prison and into the lands Niflheim. Between the towns, mountains and fields there’s plenty to see, but not much to do: there are no enemies to fight, no quests to take on and no Chocobo to ride. Still, when users who have made it into the unused lands update their game, things get interesting: suddenly the open fields have roads. The fact that game’s latest update added detail to the unused area could merely just be set dressing for players who look upon it from the game’s locked-down linear aream but some players are speculating that SquareEnix may add new areas later on . Even if that never happens, the glitch is a fascinating look at a even larger open world map. Via: Verge Source: YouTube (1) , (2)

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‘Final Fantasy XV’ out-of-bounds glitch reveals an unused open world

Over 1,800 MongoDB Databases Held For Ransom By Mysterious Attacker

An anonymous reader writes: “An attacker going by the name of Harak1r1 is hijacking unprotected MongoDB databases, stealing and replacing their content, and asking for a 0.2 Bitcoin ($200) ransom to return the data, ” reports Bleeping Computer. According to John Matherly, Shodan founder, over 1, 800 MongoDB databases have had their content replaced with a table called WARNING that contains the ransom note. Spotted by security researcher Victor Gevers, these databases are MongoDB instances that feature no administrator password and are exposed to external connections from the internet. Database owners in China have been hit, while Bleeping Computer and MacKeeper have confirmed other infections, one which hit a prominent U.S. healthcare organization and blocked access to over 200, 000 user records. These attacks are somewhat similar to attacks on Redis servers in 2016, when an unknown attacker had hijacked and installed the Fairware ransomware on hundreds of Linux servers running Redis DB. The two series of attacks don’t appear to be related. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Over 1,800 MongoDB Databases Held For Ransom By Mysterious Attacker

Windows 10 Getting a Game Mode That Would Improve Game Performance – Report

Microsoft may have plans to improve gaming experience on Windows 10. The speculation comes after long time watcher @h0x0d found a new “gamemode.dll” in the latest Windows 10 developer build, reports GameSpot. The feature appears to allow Windows 10 to adjust CPU and GPU resources when running a game to allocate more power for the game that’s running instead of toward any background apps. From the article: The feature will reportedly launch as part of the Creators update and will be enabled for Windows Insider users soon. What’s unclear is exactly which games this is compatible with. It’s possible it could be limited to only to those downloaded from the Windows Store, or it might be much more far-reaching. We should know more once Windows Insiders testers get their hands on the feature. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Windows 10 Getting a Game Mode That Would Improve Game Performance – Report