Top all-time · #8161
www.benshoof.org/blog
Personal blog · benshoof.org/bloggameshistoryprogramming
www.benshoof.org/blog is a personal blog at benshoof.org about games, history and programming. Since 2016, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 11 times, most often “Sierra's Macintosh Timebomb”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for software history and retro-computing oddities, such as a cracked game's RNG hack and a Sierra Mac date bug. The comments cite its posts as examples rather than praising them.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Sierra's Macintosh Timebomb3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-01-11
- The Colonel’s Bequest – Case Cracked (2020)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-07-11
- Quest for Glory I – Macintosh Easter Egg2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-07-02
What Hacker News says?
There was an example of this reposted here just last week: https://www.benshoof.org/blog/case-cracked The crack for The Colonel's Bequest worked by hardcoding the RNG in the interpreter to always return the same number. This broke every random element of the game, which is undetectable on a single playthrough.
Comment linking /blog/case-cracked
on “Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam”Submitted Quest for Glory I – Macintosh Easter Egg as a story · 7 points
HN discussion> C doesn't leverage the free run time of the OS, when that OS is Windows. Stdio, no. Printf, no (unless you’re an adherent of LIBCTINY[1] or one of its descendants[2] and need only a minimal set of features). Malloc, yes—MSVC’s malloc() on Win32 has always been a thin wrapper around kernel32!HeapAlloc. Strlen or memcpy or whatnot—also possibly yes, but it’s not like minimal implementations of those are large anyway…
Comment linking /blog/minicrt
on “How small is the smallest .NET Hello World binary?”Submitted Annotated scripts of old Sierra games as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI know of another Never Ending Eternal September 1993. All Sierra games Mac ports stopped working precisely on September 18 1993! move.l Time, d0 ; seconds since January 1 1904 divu.w #$a8c0, d0 ; divide by 12 hours https://www.benshoof.org/blog/sierras-macintosh-timebomb
Comment linking /blog/sierras-macintosh-timebomb
on “Never Ending September Date”Submitted The Colonel’s Bequest – Case Cracked (2020) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Sierra's Macintosh Timebomb as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Small Programs (2010) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Colonel’s Bequest – Case Cracked (2020) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Sierra’s Macintosh Timebomb as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Quest for Glory I Macintosh Easter Egg as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
