moody

For those wondering, yes you can indeed calculate a mega drive rom checksum from the comfort of your 9front rc window:
% { echo 'n=0'; xd -2w streetsofrage.md | grep -v '[0-9a-z]+ $' | sed '1,32d;s/^.* /n=trunc(n+0x/g;s/ /+0x/g;s/$/,16)/g'} | pc | tail -n 1
0x9409

2026-03-24 04:05:05 UTC

Part of the reason I played around with the TMSS is because of these statements about this Sonic 3D Blast 814 prototype from tcrf.net[0].
Essentially stating that the ROM contained the string "Nosegay is a word." somewhere in the high end parts of the rom, and this was done specifically as a way to bypass TMSS checks. To be clear neither this or any of the Phys-Q dev kit games actually use this value, likely just bundled in with the provided software kit. Perhaps a known "legal backup" to be deployed after a C&D.
Looking through the tmss disassembly it seems like it would work, it only checks that next 4(5) bytes at 0x100 contain either "SEGA" or "SEGA" with a leading space. However you have two leading bytes you need to stuff before 0x100, which would bleed in to a copy of the ErrorTrap interrupt handler address, which very possibly is not used at all on hardware. However you still have to deal with the TMSS register inside of the IO controller itself which must be filled with 2 values containing exactly "SEGA". You could fill this straight from the rom header data without having to embed an explicit "SEGA" constant again. So it seems like yes, NOSEGAY is a valid mega drive rom header as long as you define the header to start 2 byte early.
I was curious because the overdrive demo uses a header value of "SEGA MEGA DRIVET", so I was curious what the exact checks are.
[0] https://tcrf.net/Proto:Sonic_3D_Blast_(Genesis)/814_Prototype

2026-03-23 21:56:54 UTC

My rabbit hole for last night: https://git.9front.org/plan9front/9front/598072cc6d9e221e47dc1a5958fb0b11d074db40/commit.html
games/md now can fully make use of a standard mega drive tmss rom. Not sure I've seen other emulators do this but I'm not super well versed. Would be fun to take it as a demo challenge, just 4k of rom to do something with.
https://hj.9fs.net/moody/s/post-8b26cd2efeed72406bc96fa2661e5d98.png
https://hj.9fs.net/moody/s/post-a2b9096a198f308666ab9ac53a30ba34.png

2026-03-14 05:52:50 UTC

SEGA mapper in games/md.
https://hj.9fs.net/moody/s/post-4267117f9715a3fd3ce9a66b889ad88a.png

2026-02-04 23:20:26 UTC

Reading the latest UTC notes, it seems the C2PA (a group tasked with marking AI content with some sort of watermark, sponsored by some of the worst offenders ironically), has decided the best way to tack on "metadata" to plain text as AI is to encode arbitrary data into a string of Unicode variant selectors[0] slapped onto a Zero-Width No-Break space (U+FEFF). This is not only a relatively ineffective watermark being completely trivial to strip, but is a pretty flagrant abuse of variant selectors.
[0] https://spec.c2pa.org/specifications/specifications/2.3/specs/C2PA_Specification.html#embedding_manifests_into_unstructured_text

2026-01-31 01:01:50 UTC

I did not expect 9fans to start posting lots of AI generated code, but in hindsight I should have seen it coming.

2026-01-19 15:28:46 UTC

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I'm not aware of any issues (at least that I've seen or heard about). I know vulture sometimes does rolling upgrades when a vm is restarted, did the issues coincide with that?

2026-01-15 17:43:21 UTC

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Just a bit, let's see if it captures my attention enough to max this time.

2026-01-14 19:19:32 UTC

The reason why 9front work has been slow lately.
https://hj.9fs.net/moody/s/post-5e636e40861bf0540cb1ca62ce8f75fe.png

2025-12-20 04:31:20 UTC

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Hellaphone lives again.

2025-09-11 19:52:54 UTC

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but but but what about my USE flags? How else am I going to get my software with 2000 knobs tuned to just my liking?

2025-09-10 03:24:33 UTC

Day 1 Unicode v17.0 support on 9front for normalization, grapheme break and word break.

2025-07-19 01:41:36 UTC

Testing the beta for Unicode v17.0 for 9front, thankfully this time no changes are needed for our normalization algorithm. All lights are green, and we're prepared to launch on release day.

2025-05-01 06:15:23 UTC

I've been mulling over the idea of attempting to create a custom build of 9front for the purpose of using it as a networking appliance. A NAT router box, some p2p vpn thing, etc. Something akin to OPNsense in a way. Would people be interested in that? What would you do with it? Is this a terrible waste of time?

2025-04-10 04:57:21 UTC

note: someone will make fun of you for this
https://hj.9fs.net/moody/s/df9a512e928a36d29a8accdccf119627.png

2025-03-09 19:39:34 UTC

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Fantastic.

2025-03-08 18:52:03 UTC

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There was an initial pass for unicode support, to at least not barf on it, but there was some lingering issues that prevented its use in identifiers.

2025-03-08 05:45:37 UTC

9front's yacc now supports Unicode in identifiers, can your water buffalo do that?

2025-02-09 00:29:47 UTC

I may have mentioned this before but wanted to again in case people haven't seen, 9front does have a riscv64 userspace (albeit not very well tested) and what we're really missing is someone working on a kernel (even if only for qemu). I did a decent chunk of that work and would be willing to act as support for the userspace(compilers libraries and so on) portions if someone wanted to try taking on that project. There is a start to a kernel, enough to jump in to virtual memory. I've still got the kernel portions of the power9 port to work on but considering the userspace stuff is at a decent place acting as support is doable.

2025-02-06 03:20:42 UTC

[@robpike@hachyderm.io](https://hachyderm.io/users/robpike ) During the original work on Unicode support in Plan 9, was there any consideration for the Non-Spacing Marks, like the Diacritical attaching runes? I'm just curious if it was due to a lack of approval of those portions of the standard or if it was avoided out of the amount of technical work needed to support it given the current code.

2024-10-10 11:27:23 UTC

Happy teto day
https://hj.9fs.net/moody/s/a2d217ab5e5f66b5f2c25ce671cf46ee.jpg