(TL;DR at the bottom) I'm into retro computing and live booting ISOs from flash drives, and have been looking for a live-bootable DOSBox for a while, similar to the boot-to-DOSBox raspberry pi image. I found "DOSBox Distro - A LiveUSB Linux Distro which boots directly into DOSBox" but it didn't boot under UEFI or work the way I wanted it to... and hadn't been updated in a few years. That left one solution - doing it myself.
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Why: Over the years I've tinkered with game hacking - learning and using techniques like memory scanning and reverse engineering, and recently looking in Unity3D specific methods and tools. Unity3D is a widely used game development tool, providing loads of functionality for you to use in your game to accelerate the development process - I suspected this meant many games use similar logic, principles, and possibly flaws. Inspired by "Pwn Adventure 3: Pwnie Island" which I found out about through LiveOverflow's video series, and challenges I did recently in RACTF 20221, I decided to make my own "game hacking ctf" challenge.
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Background / Sonoff: Once upon a time I wanted the ability to know when a device plugged into an electrical socket was no longer using electricity. This lead me to get a "Sonoff POW 2" - a popular "smart" electrical switch with power monitoring capabilities. While this did what I needed it forced me to use their software (and have my plug talk to the cloud), and I wanted to do more.
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Some time back I bought a Pentium 200Mhz MMX computer in a nice 90's case with matching brand monitor and keyboard. I decided I wanted to set it to run Dos 6.22, to play my favourite Dos games, as well as Windows 98 for games like Diablo 1 and large storage + usb support. This post is mostly notes for myself about some of the pain points I encountered over many weekends of re-formatting, moving peripherals around, installing different drivers, etc.
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SANS once again ran their Holiday Hack - called Kringle Con - for the 3rd time last year. As usual it was filled with great challenges and there was plenty to learn. I was able to complete all the challenges/objectives and had intended to do a full write up, which I try and do every year, but just didn't have the time or energy this year. @leonjza has already done a great write up so I thought I'd just mention a few things I'd done differently.
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Some time ago I learned about a Nintendo NES (Famicom) cartridge called "van der Merwe en Boetie", released only in South Africa and supposedly a Super Mario Bros clone. The title is a common Afrikaans surname ("van der Merwe") followed by "and his brother" (in Afrikaans) - definitely local, and relatively close to "Mario Bros". I'd seen a few photos of the cartridge - even internationally on Twitter - and a few people in the local vintage computing group claimed to have a copy of the cartridge but either couldn't find it or weren't keen on sharing it.
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