(This Page is very outdated)
I hacked 3D Pinball to always win.
I always enjoyed finding glitches in games, using Cheat Engine to take things a step further, and eventually: learning to decompile executables and statically analyze assembly code.
If you’ve ever played Microsoft’s 3D Pinball Space Cadet, you might be familiar with the “Redeploy Ball” mechanic: if you score an embarrassingly low number of points on a particular deployment, then rather than losing the life on dropping the ball, you get to redeploy that same ball instead, keeping your points as well as your lives.
Using a combination of static analysis through Ghidra and IDA, and dynamic analysis through Cheat Engine, I tracked down the exact byte for the jump command that determines whether you get to replay the ball, or whether you lose a life. I patched that one byte in order to make a version of the game that you could never lose.
The Benefits:
- I learned a lot about static analysis
- I can get a really high score in pinball
The Not-So-Benefits:
- Games that you can’t lose cease to be games
- You can’t save your score without losing
I made a personal voice-based GPT Chat bot.
(Which was neat and impressive when I did it years ago, and is no longer cool at all because all AI models have this baked in now, so)
ChatGPT is extremely cool and incredibly useful. You know what makes it a bit less cool in my opinion? Having to open the app on my phone, or navigate to the website in order to make use of its functionality. So, I made it easier.
Using the help of ChatGPT and the OpenAI documentation, I created a Python script that allows me to:
- Convert spoken words into a request to the ChatGPT API
- Convert the API’s response into a spoken voice
- Play back that response via my default audio output device
Now, instead of having to visit the site, I can just hit a hotkey on my keyboard at any time and directly interface with ChatGPT just using my voice!