Disco Stu used to sit behind me at my last job. He taught me the arcane ways of Perl, apt-get update and apt-get upgrade. He showed me NetHack. He also personally executed the most brilliant old-school hack I have ever witnessed.
Disco Stu was paid by my previous employer to crack the MetroWerks compiler for Nintendo Game Cube. The result was a cheap Nintendo dev cube that performed the same function as the super-expensive debug dev cube. With an ethernet adapter, a special NR disc, the newly cracked binaries, and the cheap cube, developers could stream the dev version of the game without buying the expensive cube. I believe they could also debug the game. The dev pipeline for NGC now cost thousands of dollars less per developer than Nintendo hoped we would pay.
The guts of the great hack was old-school cracking; reading through the assembly and editing instructions in the binaries for the compiler tools.
Also astounding was that the developer would so blatantly decide to cut costs by defanging the publisher. And that it worked, and so quickly.
The guts of the great hack was old-school cracking; reading through the assembly and editing instructions in the binaries for the compiler tools.
Also astounding was that the developer would so blatantly decide to cut costs by defanging the publisher. And that it worked, and so quickly.
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