iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

With me it's the swivel that lost its grip. Creative use of a zip tie to the rescue 😅

Picture of a purse string being held in place with a zip tie

Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

What I've basically been saying this whole time. Turns out some people figured that out over 40 years ago. I program to formalize my understanding of the problem I'm trying to solve, not to get something out the door as quickly as possible.

Slide from the talk with a quote by P. Naur(1984): "the proper, primary aim of programming is, not to produce programs, but to have the programmer build theories of the manner in which the problem at hand are solved by program execution"

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Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

In short: bad hank McCoy developed a virus that forcefully triggers the X gene, or kills if it can't. This panel at the end of the prologue X-Men issue makes me think the writers do have smth to say with this 😅 Time will tell how it's actually handled though

Cyclops saying "I saw a future where the X-Virus was loosed. I fought my way across a mutant nation built on the bones of the murdered. It makes no difference to me if it's 3K this time rather than Revelation: We are *not* humans. We will *not* gain our homeland at the cost of genocide. "

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Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Or, hear me out, a giant balloon float!

Screenshot of the start of Rayquaza's Balloon Panic attraction in Pokepark, showing off a giant Rayquaza balloon floating in the sky.

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Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Here's a sneak preview of the minimal repro: dynamic_cast<Derived*>(Base2*) fails when it shouldn't if Concrete is the concrete type. Downcasting to Derived* from Base1* does work as expected.

Inheritance diagram showing the following hierarchy starting at the concrete class: concrete derives from two classes, called Derived and C respectively. Derived has two bases itself, called Base1 and Base2, while C also inherits from Derived(causing a second copy of that subtree to show up again as well)

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Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

We have this hanging on the wall above our desk. Helpful reminder once in a while

(intentionally) shitty yellow star with off-center text saying "at least its not ai"

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Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Can someone who's mutals with him quote post this as an answer to @nikpayuk.bsky.social's latest post? (or hopefully he sees it bc of this). The reason west->east flights are faster than east->west is because of the jet stream. Rotation of the earth is too slow on that timescale to matter.

Diagram showing the four main jet streams flowing west->east on the earth.

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Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

And with that, the decompilation of pokepark wii has officially started 😀 Found the math lib source that matched extremely neatly(only had to patch one function), adding another 16kB of matched code bytes pushing me over the 0.5% treshold. decomp.dev/SephDB/pokep...

Screenshot of decomp.me showing pokepark wii: pikachu's adventure as one of the listed decompilation projects

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Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 02/08/2025

those rules at page 106 and ahead just say "or otherwise violate the Standards". "Standards" is defined in the definition section, page 206 as basically anything written by the Corporation(see screenshot), so it includes the NDA'd documents they mention later in the thread.

Standards

The organizational documents, operating rules, regulations, policies, and procedures of the
Corporation, including but not limited to any manuals, guides, announcements or bulletins, as
may be amended from time to time.

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Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

I was encountering the first pattern a lot in ghidra's decompilation output for pokepark's scripting language, but then I tried to see if simplifying the implementation of the jump instruction used would help, and it gave me the second output. Which is more unreadable, you think? 😂

if (iVar3 == 3) {
if (iVar2 == 1) {
bVar1 = true;
}
else {
bVar1 = false;
}
}
else {
bVar1 = false;
}
if (bVar1) {

bVar1 = iVar3 == 3;
if ((bVar1) && (bVar1 = iVar2 == 1, bVar1)) {
bVar1 = true;
}
if (bVar1) {

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Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

Turns out that giving ghidra correct stack information is important 😅 (I finally found out how to do so for this bytecode processor that does some weird shit) A loop with a call to another function inside it made analysis go haywire until it knows the calling convention of popping args off the stack

Ghidra's decompilation view showing a near unreadable mess of pointer operations to the stack in a loop.

The same window but now all cleaned up, a for loop got detected, and there are no more pointer operations left.

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Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

So, err, about that yak shave of a decompilation project😂 Five layers deep at this point ^^ I'm having fun though.

Screenshot of a local compiler explorer instance using MWCC, the wii and gamecube's compiler to compile a simple c++ snippet.

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Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 03/05/2025

so struct A { int a; } struct B : virtual A {int b;} struct C : virtual A {int c;} struct D : B,C {int d;} Looks like this in memory:

Table showing the memory layout of D type described in the post. It starts with a subobject of B having two members, a vbase pointer(which it shares with the overall object D) and the b member. Then follows the C subobject with another vbase pointer and its own c member. Then D's d member, followed by an object of type A with its own a member. Both vbase pointers point to the A object.

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Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

Decided to take a detour and write some scripting for ghidra to automatically recover class hierarchies based on available RTTI information. Here's the player class(the DelegateObserver inheritance is non-virtual, btw). Next up: figuring out ghidra's analysis API so I can automate all of it.

Class hierarchy diagram of the class called nsObject::Player. It inherits from a bunch of subclasses of nsDelegate::DelegateObserver, as well as nsObject::Object, which itself inherits from nsUtility::Nullable

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Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 20/04/2025

Making some progress on this again, been busy reverse engineering the types involved engine-side. Just got all 14 main "managers" given their vtables and such! The ones that most likely require a deep-dive are GlobalManager, EventManager and EventScriptInterface.

Screenshot of ghidra's namespace view, showing a bunch of manager classes defined, like BokehManager, EffectManager, GlobalManager, EventManager, etc.

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Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

Working on archipelago(randomizer) integration for Anodyne. Just finished getting co-op synchronization working for quite a few in-game events.

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Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

And with that, a milestone has been reached! I have enough instructions defined to disassemble a simple function. This one is called OPEN, so it probably opens the gate somehow. Need to figure out what all these syscall 0x15 do later ^^'

disassembly view of a function that reserves two spots on the stack, then calls syscall 0x15 5 times with varying arguments.

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Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

And that's the first successfully disassembled instruction! Biggest stumbling block was figuring out bit ordering for the different fields in SLEIGH ^^' Modelling these syscalls in PCode is going to be a challenge not to make them all black box external calls though.

Screenshot showing a disassembled syscall opcode with all arguments decoded.

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Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

And that's an initial loader for the format written(just the header right now, but a bunch of legwork done)! I will eventually get there, Ghidra docs are few and far between though ^^' Pokepark's scripts _will_ get broken open eventually.

Screenshot of ghidra's listing view, showing the first 32 bytes of the script being successfully parsed by the new loader, with pointers to the different file sections and the script name decoded, along with two unused fields.

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Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

Pokepark(Wii) reverse engineering, turns out the game's scripts have their symbol tables encoded in a base 40 string(6 characters for each 4 bytes of data). After some wrangling with Ghidra's API, I now successfully have a custom data type that visualizes the strings correctly!

Table of data shown in Ghidra's disassembly view, with multiple blocks of a successfully decoded string followed by a number

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Seph De Busser @sephdebusser.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Pretty happy with how neat this bit of bingo checking code turned out. Web client for the bingo AP world. #screenshotsaturday #gamedev

Code for checking bingo when a new square gets added to the board. Heavily simplifies the actual checks through some helper functions in a functional way.

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