Top all-time · #22093
boricj’s entropy-increasing blog
Personal blog · boricj.net · on HN as boricjprogrammingsystemsgames
boricj’s entropy-increasing blog is a personal blog at boricj.net about programming, systems and games. Since 2023, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Readers link this blog's Atari Jaguar SDK series, which covers reverse engineering and porting programs. One linked post describes porting a Linux a.out i386 program to a native Windows PE executable without its source.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Increasing entropy inside the universe.
Most-linked posts?
- /atari-jaguar-sdk/2024/01/02/part-5.html2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-01-03
What Hacker News says?
You can find the table of contents for the series there: https://boricj.net/reverse-engineering/2023/05/01/introducti... I expect that you'll be mostly interested in parts 2 through 6. Part 1 explains how a toolchain works in general (so mostly CS 101 stuff as the OP put it). Parts 7 to 10 demonstrates the delinking technique by easing into it, a technique which is as powerful as it is esoteric, but probably not wha…
Comment linking /reverse-engineering/2023/05/01/introduction.html
on “Reverse Engineering for Everyone”Submitted Ghidra-delinker-extension is snowballing out of control as a story · 19 points
HN discussion>> As an example, the latest Atari Jaguar linker (aln) for Linux was released back in 1995. It's a proprietary, statically-linked 32-bit Linux a.out executable. > That’s not a user land problem. That’s a CPU architecture problem. Windows solves this WOW64 which provides a compatibility layer for 32bit pointers et al. In this specific case, it really is a user-land problem. I've went to the trouble of converting that…
Comment linking /atari-jaguar-sdk/2024/01/02/part-5.html
on “Convert Linux to Windows”Submitted A modding framework powered by the tears of CS101 teachers as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> Will this also work without painstakingly reversing things in the binary, say in the case of a giant game executable? You can get away with a Ghidra database that isn't accurate, as long as you know what you're doing. Basically, as long as the analyzers manage to identify all of the relocation spots inside your exportation, the rest doesn't matter that much. You can even get away with missing relocation spots insi…
Comment linking /atari-jaguar-sdk/2024/01/02/part-5.html
on “Show HN: A Ghidra extension for exporting parts of a program as object files”> Would it be possible to export basically the entire program at once and then slice off individual functions one by one? Yes. The exporters can handle whatever meaningful address selection you can throw at them, including multiple disjoint ranges within the same section. So you can keep carving holes inside your selection until nothing remains of the original program. > Do you have any guides/examples of the Ship o…
Comment linking /tenchu1/2024/05/31/part-11.html
on “Show HN: A Ghidra extension for exporting parts of a program as object files”That would warrant an entire blog post to describe all the pitfalls [1], but I'll condense it down to the highlights. On MIPS, loading a pointer is classically done in two instructions, a LUI and an ADDIU, which forms a HI16/LO16 relocation pair I need to identify precisely in order to delink code. I'm using Ghidra's references in my analyzers, but these are attached to only one instruction operand, typically a regi…
Comment linking /tenchu1/2024/05/15/part-10.html
on “Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?”It's on my profile page: https://boricj.net
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?”I think it's too weak as a paper for me to put out there. I also haven't even applied the minor corrections from the reviews. If you want to take a peek at the case studies, I've blogged about my butchering of aln across C standard libraries and operating systems [1]; there is also widberg's outstanding write-up of their FUEL decompilation project [2], which uses ghidra-delinker-extension as part of the magic. If yo…
Comment linking /atari-jaguar-sdk/2023/11/27/introduction.html
on “Cormac McCarthy's tips on how to write a science paper (2019) [pdf]”I'm documenting my progress on my personal blog ( https://boricj.net ). Currently I'm in the process of porting data from a leftover SYM file onto a closely matching EXE, the next article should be out by the end of the week-end. Be warned, I'm going about this with a very different approach than most decompilation projects out there. I want to delink these executables back into working, reusable object files. The p…
Comment linking /
on “PS1 Programming Course with MIPS Assembly and C”> The most impressive one so far is making a port of a ~100 KiB Linux a.out i386 program to a native Windows PE i386 executable, despite not having access to its original source code or even decompiling it. This is indeed really impressive! (direct link: https://boricj.net/atari-jaguar-sdk/2024/01/02/part-5.html )
Comment linking /atari-jaguar-sdk/2024/01/02/part-5.html
on “Show HN: A Ghidra extension that turns programs back into object files”ghidra-delinker-extension [1]. It's a Ghidra extension for exporting relocatable object files from programs, which enables all kinds of heresy I've dubbed "Mad Max-driven development". Somehow, it landed me an academic poster presentation [2] at the 2025 SURE Workshop, part of ACM CCS 2025 held in Taiwan. As a hobbyist playing Doctor Frankenstein with bits instead of gibs in my spare time, that is "received an invit…
Comment linking /2025/10/25/ghidra-delinker-extension-and-boricj-do-acm-ccs-2025.html
on “Ask HN: What Project are you the most proud of?”Indeed, you can kludge anything together into working chimeras, as long as you can mend the ABIs together. I've done a case study where I've ported a Linux a.out program into a native Windows PE program without source code: https://boricj.net/atari-jaguar-sdk/2023/11/27/introduction.... Another case study was ripping the archive code from a PlayStation game and stuffing it into a Linux MIPS program to create an asse…
Comment linking /tenchu1/2024/03/18/part-6.html
on “Ghidra by NSA”https://boricj.net/ About two months ago, there was an Ask HN about the most interesting interesting tech you built for just yourself [1]. In this topic, I shared about my Ghidra modifications to unlink pieces of an executable back into relocatable object files [2] in an effort to reverse-engineer a PlayStation 1 video game. Long story short, I've wanted to write about this esoteric but powerful technique and it sno…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”