Top all-time · #2788
Silent’s Blog
Personal blog · cookieplmonster.github.iogamesprogramming
Silent’s Blog is a personal blog at cookieplmonster.github.io about games and programming. Since 2018, 27 different Hacker News readers have linked it 31 times, most often “How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Silent's posts on patching and debugging old PC games, such as investigations of GTA San Andreas bugs and Windows 11 compatibility problems. Commenters cite them as sources for their own points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A blog and portfolio featuring my game modifications, patches, and technical writeups for PC and console games.
Most-linked posts?
- How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H26 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2025-04-23
- High resolution timers and high uptime headaches3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-08-07
- Year 2038 problem is still alive and well3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-02-18
- About Cyberpunk 2077 and AMD CPUs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-12-14
What Hacker News says?
There are QOL mods[0] available for that version to get the camera (and controller in general, and other stuff) working better. Can't speak to the Deck HW or Steam OS specifically, but the SilentPatch and GInput mods have been working great for me on Proton under Linux Mint. [0] https://cookieplmonster.github.io/mods/gta-vc/
Comment linking /mods/gta-vc/
on “You can now play Grand Theft Auto Vice City in the browser”Submitted How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2 as a story · 1371 points
HN discussionFrankly this kind of stuff getting upvoted kind of makes HN less and less valuable as a news source - this is yet another "hey I trivially exposed something to the LLM and I got some funny results on a toy example". These kind of demos were cool 2 years ago - then we got function calling in the API, it became super easy to build this stuff - and the reality hit that LLMs were kind of shit and unreliable at using eve…
Comment linking /2025/04/23/gta-san-andreas-win11-24h2-bug/
on “AI Meets WinDBG”Submitted Fixing Mass Effect black blobs on modern AMD CPUs as a story · 562 points
HN discussionThe write up of how Windows 11 24H2 broke GTA San Andreas was excellent. https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2025/04/23/gta-san-andreas...
Comment linking /2025/04/23/gta-san-andreas-win11-24h2-bug/
on “Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction”Submitted Year 2038 problem is still alive and well as a story · 235 points
HN discussionIt's also a common thing that Silent (aka CookiePLMonster) fixes in the games he patches. See for example: - https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2020/05/23/silentpatch-maf... - https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2021/02/27/silentpatch-yak...
Comment linking /2021/02/27/silentpatch-yakuza-remastered-collection-r2/
on “I couldn't debug the code because of my name”Submitted Restoring the Gold Filter in Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Director’s Cut as a story · 140 points
HN discussionSo fixing approx. 5-10% of CVEs (by zero-initializing all stack vars) is a worse cure than letting these uninitialized stack vars be possible sources of exploits? see https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2020/05/solving-uninitialize... Initializing the stack var to zero would have helped mitigate the recently discovered problem in GTA San Andreas (the real problem is an unvalidated data file) - see https://cookieplmonste…
Comment linking /2025/04/23/gta-san-andreas-win11-24h2-bug/
on “Odin: A programming language made for me”Submitted High resolution timers and high uptime headaches as a story · 91 points
HN discussionA few years back, Intel was striking marketing deals with large game developers that included them giving away free copies of their compiler and support. It's unclear how prevalent that was, though there were a few titles with an Intel splash logo that were part of this. This is often assumed to be the cause of the difference of performances between AMD and Intel CPUs in games btw, and while that can definitely come…
Comment linking /2020/12/13/cyberpunk-2077-and-amd-cpus/
on “Intel C/C++ compilers complete adoption of LLVM”Submitted A technical dive into the new Tokyo Xtreme Racer as a story · 33 points
HN discussion>Not at all? Most memory-safety issues will never even show up in the radar Citation needed? There's all sorts of problems that don't "show up" but are bad. Obvious historical examples would be heartbleed and cloudbleed, or this ancient GTA bug [1]. 1: https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2025/04/23/gta-san-andreas...
Comment linking /2025/04/23/gta-san-andreas-win11-24h2-bug/
on “Hardening the C++ Standard Library at scale”Submitted Remastering Colin McRae Rally 3 with SilentPatch as a story · 19 points
HN discussionWhat is this site? This is the actual site from the actual modder: https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2018/07/07/farcry-d3d9-bug... This looks like a copycat site? What for?
Comment linking /2018/07/07/farcry-d3d9-bug/
on “Fixing a Direct3D9 bug in Far Cry (2018)”Submitted Year 2038 problem is still alive and well as a story · 5 points
HN discussionPretty much all the Renderware based GTAs have issues these days that only community made patches can mitigate. A recent example is that in San Andreas, the seaplane never spawns if you're running Windows 11 24H2 or newer. All of it due to a bug that's always been in the game, but only the recent changes in Windows caused it to show up. If anybody's interested, you can read the investigation on it here: https://cook…
Comment linking /2025/04/23/gta-san-andreas-win11-24h2-bug/
on “Win32 is the stable Linux ABI”Submitted Clever bug exploitation – backface culling as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYou can read more about it here: https://cookieplmonster.github.io/about/
Comment linking /about/
on “Remastering Colin McRae Rally 3 with SilentPatch”Submitted About Cyberpunk 2077 and AMD CPUs as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Emulator Bug? No, LLVM Bug as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted High uptime headaches due to floating point high resolution timers as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted 10th anniversary of SilentPatch! as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Dreamcast Restoration 2.0 and SilentPatch for Crazy Taxi (PC game mod release) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Crashing DInput8 DLL with two lines of code as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fan research vs. official fix – Yakuza 0 lighting as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Year 2038 problem is still alive and well as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fixing a Completely Random Bug in Cxbx-Reloaded – Star Wars: KotOR as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Coding a Single Instance Application the wrong way as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted High resolution timers and high uptime headaches as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
