svenpeter

I work at a unionized company in Germany and didn’t have to join the union or pay any dues to start working.

Technically employees who aren’t part of the union aren’t entitled to the benefits they negotiated. In reality everyone gets the same benefits anyway because otherwise the employer would create a huge incentive for everyone to join the union which would make strikes hurt even more.

IIRC we know about their internal Linux port because of some comment left in the open source XNU release.

That merge only has fixed because of how the development model works: there’s a merge window where new features are merged and which then becomes -rc1. After that only fixes are allowed until the final release of that version and then the merge window opens again.

The list was at least updated after iOS:

I've found wiibrew.org and hackmii.com in there which are both Wii homebrew sites that became popular around 2008/2009 and probably declined in popularity starting in ~2012/2013.

Then there's also wiiu-developers.nintendo.com and wiiudaily.com which probably didn't exist before late 2012 or early 2013 when the WiiU was released.

I don't think ARMv8 requires EL3 but even if it did there is no EL3 on the M1.

Booting Windows natively would require Microsoft's support since some rather invasive changes to the kernel would be required (FIQ support, DART instead of SMMU) on top of implementing drivers for everything.

It’s been a while since my last physics lectures so this might be wrong, but the way i understand it:

We don’t have a good model of quantum gravity yet but our best guess is that the force carrier of gravity might be a particle called graviton. This hypothetical particle has no mass and therefore the length scale of gravity would be infinite. This matches the Newtonian and the general relativity model of gravity.

This is different from the source of gravity which would be the (gravitational) mass of an object (or more accurately the components of the stress energy tensor which describe the density and flux of energy but that’s also the point where I have to start with the hand waving because my knowledge becomes very fuzzy there)

It’s also true for the electromagnetic interaction: the force carrier here is the photon which is also massless and the length scale is also infinite here.

no worries, this stuff happened over a decade ago. I can sometimes barely remember the details :)

> Is it weird that you sound proud about this? Is there something noble about doing work that makes lives harder for hobbyists trying to preserve video games for the future, and has nearly zero impact on the actual sales of the game at release?

What makes you think we did it for any of those reasons? And how does us abusing hardware bugs make video game preservation any harder?

This was not for a commercial game, this was for an entry point to load your own software on a locked down video game console.

And back then people were selling our (free!) software and we added those protections to make sure we could show a "you have been scammed if you paid for this" screen that couldn't be removed. Unfortunately that also meant breaking our loader from running in emulators, but that didn't matter at all: Those could just directly launch actual .elf files anyway and didn't need the detour through the homebrew channel.

The code (minus those protections) for the Homebrew Channel is also available as open source these days.

To be fair, we deliberately used very obscure hardware "features" which we knew were not implemented by any emulators and probably not used by any games to build these protections :-)

I'd have to dig up the old code but I'm fairly sure some of them rely on an operating system (Nintendo IOS, unrelated to both Cisco's IOS and Apple's iOS) running on the co-processor (nicknamed "Starlet"). Dolphin doesn't emulate that part at all because IOS exposes a high-level interface that can just be emulated instead. Works amazingly well for games, but will probably trip our protections.

Ah, that makes a lot of sense. Then this unified MMIO NVMe is "just" emulated inside ANS.

NVMe requires a co-processor (which Apple calls "ANS") to be up and running before it works. This co-processor firmware seems to have a lot of code and strings dealing with PCIe. Now I haven't looked at the firmware in detail but I'm willing to bet that the actual drives are on a PCIe bus (or at least used to be on a PCIe bus on previous hardware).

It's just that this bus is not exposed to the main CPU but only to this co-processor instead. The co-processor then seems to emulate (or maybe it's just a passthrough) a relatively standard NVMe MMIO space.