Status Update - January 2024

Hello! In January I took it easy, so for once I have no updates on any contributions and/or new releases. However, I have a few things in progress. Let's get to it.

SilentPatch

My original plan of going open source in January has failed, but for a good reason - I've been going back to the codebase and integrating multiple new fixes, those contributed by Wesser in the SP topic over the past few years, as well as new fixes done by me. For example:

• I re-wrote my changes related to the custom number plates and not only simplified the code but also fixed at least one bug caused by my implementation - if the player tried to install an upgrade on a car with a custom license plate, all future instances of this car model had the same custom license plate! My new version of the fix is free of such issues.
• I went back and fixed one of the bugs that I "failed" to address in the past, yet it's annoyed me since I first played San Andreas in 2005 - biker cops are scripted to do drive-by attacks on the player's car, and they don't stop if the player loses wanted level naturally or through cheats. As of the time of writing this post, I fixed this issue last night.

Once I'm done with San Andreas, I plan to go back to III and Vice City and fix a few outstanding issues there too. I plan to throw in several new fixes, as well as internal changes - I recently found out that both III and Vice City can be affected by a Mandatory ASLR security policy in Windows, and SilentPatch doesn't like it. Thankfully, it's a trivial fix.

Flipper Zero

I got a Flipper Zero gifted for Christmas, so naturally, the first thing I did with it was set up the development environment for it 😉 Of course, as it always goes for me, I ended up immediately running into issues, but I could deal with them fine.

The first tangible result of my experiments is a Mode 7-style rendering demo! I recreated the iconic pseudo-3D effect utilized in numerous SNES games, and it works great on Flipper:

Once SilentPatch is out, I am planning to get back to it - and see how far a Flipper Zero can be pushed as a "gaming device", as the currently available games for it are quite simplistic. With a 64MHz CPU and 256KB of RAM (~140KB of which is available to applications), it is going to be an interesting challenge!