field notes from
ADHD hyperfocus.
Every post here started as a rabbit hole I couldn't leave alone — a deadlock, an undocumented protocol, a system misbehaving in a way nobody had written up. These are the write-ups from the other side.
Tools
Reads the six wrestling games AKI built for the Nintendo 64 — roster, parameters, movesets, damage tables and a MIPS disassembler for the game code itself. Bring your own ROM; it stays on your computer. All tools →
Blog
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The Music Format of the Six AKI N64 Wrestling Games, Measured on Six Cartridges
The six AKI N64 wrestling games hold almost no recorded music. A song is a list of commands and a bank of short samples. I read all six cartridges with my own tool. Here is how the format works, where every number comes from, what changed between the games, and the honest answer to the MP3 question.
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How a Move Works in the Six AKI N64 Wrestling Games, and a Shooting Star Press for Andre the Giant
A move in these games is 98 bytes a frame: 19 bones, three angles each, and a root that moves. Every bone turns in world space, which is why a move can be lifted out whole. I read all six cartridges with my own tool. Here is how a move is stored, how the game plays it back, and how damage is worked out. Then the test: I took Billy Kidman's Shooting Star Press out of WCW/nWo Revenge and gave it to Andre the Giant in WWF No Mercy. Every angle came over with zero error. The event track did not.
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Your First Two Pins in WCW/nWo Revenge Can Never Win — Unless Your Spirit Meter Is 70 Points Ahead
Players have said for twenty-five years that your first two pins in WCW/nWo Revenge can never win. The game's code agrees, and says why. It counts how often each wrestler has kicked out. Until your opponent has kicked out twice, eighteen instructions cut any hold of 88 ticks down to 87. A tick is one pass of the game's logic, and thirty of them make a second. The referee needs 90. There is one way past it: a spirit lead of 70 points over an opponent with an empty health bar. Then your first cover wins. The whole fight logic is here as a Python module you can run.
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Every Fighter in WCW/nWo Revenge, Ranked by What the Engine Actually Does
Who is really the best wrestler in WCW/nWo Revenge? All 62 fighters, ranked. The rank comes from their real move tables, run through the game's own damage math. Scott Norton comes first. The field is also much flatter than the arguing suggests.
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Your Carrier's App Isn't Required to Activate an eSIM — I Decompiled One to Prove It
My carrier moved every self-service task into its app. So I pulled the app apart to see how it turns on an eSIM. Under the branding there is nothing of their own. It is a standard code, and your phone does the rest. Here is what an eSIM really is, and how to set one up without the app.
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Why Windows Search Freezes for 30 Seconds After Every Reboot
Windows Search went blank for 30 seconds after every reboot, on four PCs. The cause is a deadlock between the search indexer and Dropbox. Here is how I traced it, what helps, and the search tool I built to replace it.
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Reverse Engineering Samsung's HD+ TVkey Cloud
I pulled 260 MB of firmware off a Samsung TV. Inside is the code that unlocks paid HD channels. This is why millions of German TVs keep losing them.