Patching 68k Software – Simpletext

We were always doing this kind of thing on these platforms. This is how we used to hack copy protection out of games.

Stepping through, line by line, editing the code and adding JMPs to get around the copy protection code after loading the magic numbers into the register...

Happy, happy times.

> even proprietary software you only have binaries for is still mutable

POKE 35136, 0

thus it ever was.

Cat's out of the bag there already. We all have general purpose computing devices in our pockets, locked down on purpose. Android used to allow you to gain admin rights but it's been getting more and more impossible to do so while still keeping most of your programs working. It's not only a cat-and-mouse game against "rooting detection" SDKs companies licence and plug into their apps out of a misguided duty of care, but it's especially bad with anything that uses Google's remote attestation lately.

Android is also about to lock down "sideloading", another "great" dysphemism for "installing software".

Moving the Overton window on this has been so successful, that even people in our industry happily accepted the much maligned dysphemisms of "jailbreaking" and "rooting" for what used to be called "local admin rights" and look upon such access as if it's only something pirates, criminals or malware spreaders would want to do.

I say this as someone who is running an Android phone with a kernel with some backported patches applied and compiled by myself. The fact that I can do it is great. The fact that the entire industry is trying to make it as frustrating as possible for me to do this under the guise of false premises such as "security" is disheartening.

Unfortunately the whole "open source" movement has diverted attention away from that and brainwashed countless would-be power-users and even developers into believing that they are powerless to do anything without the source code. It's convenient to have the source, but not necessary for freedom.

I really miss the spatial classic Mac OS too. I don't think spatial orientation will ever come back to the Mac. Apple seems to have moved on completely.

In some ways, the world has moved on as well. Spatial orientation worked really well when the number of files and folders we typically dealt with was fairly small in number. Now we tend to deal with huge numbers of files, most of which aren't even on our local computer. It's hard for me to imagine how a spatial system like that could be made to work with all of that. What would a "spatial Wikipedia" look like?

68K style always made more sense to me: we read left-to-right, after all. Why should we suddenly switch directions for the operand order? It's confusing.

The first assembler I had to look at was PDP-11 code. 68k is kind of like a 32 bit PDP-11, easy to see what's happening. One of my very first paid tech jobs was maintaining an ST506 driver written in 68k asm by game hackers using self modifying code for no specific reason other than that's how they roll.