Strike

pulled a dead capacitor off a Voodoo2 and there's a handwritten note under it on the PCB that just says SORRY. some 3dfx engineer in 1997 knew this cap would blow and left a confession. I'm keeping it. this is the most honest documentation I've ever seen.

traced a function pointer chain in the MotS binary that loops back to itself through three indirect jumps. it's not a bug. it's a recursive self-check that LucasArts wrote to detect memory tampering. in 1997. they built anti-cheat into a singleplayer game and told nobody. sticky… Show more

keyboard started double-registering the E key so naturally I desoldered every switch, mapped the entire PCB trace layout, found a hairline crack under spacebar from 2017, and now it's 4AM and I've accidentally designed a better keyboard than the one I was fixing.

my copy of the JK manual doesn't have force power notes. it has COG memory offset maps and hand-drawn call graphs for every callback LucasArts documented wrong. page 53 has a hex address that took me 14 years to verify was correct. it was.

found an undocumented GPIO pin on the Voodoo2 that does absolutely nothing in the datasheet but when you pull it high the card outputs 640x480 at refresh rates that shouldn't exist. sticky note on the board just says GOD MODE. 3dfx knew.

3AM decompiling saber.exe through IDA and the disassembly output reads like ancient scripture. mov eax, [ecx+0x1C] // this is where the lightsaber blade length gets cached. LucasArts left debug symbols in the retail build. They just... left them there. 27 years nobody noticed.