I wanted to get a cheap notebook that i can use while travelling. My requirements were the following:
Possibility to run Linux or Windows 8.1 (not RT) Minimum 4 GB RAM SSD of at least 128 GB Dual Core x86 CPU Enough power for 720p x264 video playback Maximum weight 1,5 kg The ACER Aspire V3-371-57S2 (600 Eu) or Microsoft Surface 3 (870 Eu) matched that requirements, but with a price of 600 Euro it was more than I wanted to spend.
In 2005, Microsoft started the anti-piracy initiative called Genuine Advantage. To be able to download from Microsoft Download Center, you would have had to pass the validation. It was the first time that Microsoft acknowledged the existence of Wine, by blocking its access to the downloads if a Wine specific registry key was found by the ActiveX control or their standalone tool.
These are some ways to detect Wine:
Registry # Check for the existence of “SOFTWARE\Wine\Wine\Config”
Starting with an empty project, I will show you how to use Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 to compile your C code without the usual bloating that the compiler adds automatically. This article will just feature C code, I may extend this blog entry for usage with C++ at a later point.
In the empty workspace, create a new file called tinyexe.c with following content:
#include <windows.h> void main() { MessageBoxA(0, "Hello", "world!
Starting with an empty Plain C Project in Qt Creator IDE and gcc from MinGW as compiler, I will show you how to generate small binaries that are independent from MinGW dlls. At the writing of this article the app versions that I used were Qt Creator 2.6.2 with Qt 5.0.1 and gcc 4.7.2.
Replace the code of the main.c with following:
#include <windows.h> void main() { MessageBoxA(0, "Hello", "world!", MB_OK); ExitProcess(0); } Switch the build configuration in menu Projects from Debug to Release and compile the project (Ctrl + B is the default shortcut for this).
Using nasm, we can build the smallest possible native exe (without using a packer, dropper or anything like that) file that will work on all Windows versions. This is what one of the possible solution binary looks like:
The code for this little cutie:
IMAGEBASE equ 400000h BITS 32 ORG IMAGEBASE ; IMAGE_DOS_HEADER dw "MZ" ; e_magic dw 0 ; e_cblp ; IMAGE_NT_HEADERS - lowest possible start is at 0x4 Signature: dw 'PE',0 ; Signature ; IMAGE_FILE_HEADER dw 0x14c ; Machine = IMAGE_FILE_MACHINE_I386 dw 0 ; NumberOfSections user32.
One day I had the idea of converting my fr29b DOS intro to JavaScript. Using the canvas element of HTML5, this should be an easy task and offer a good performance as well. To make the port as similar as possible, the standard VGA DOS palette should be supported. Drawing the ARGB values into the canvas can be speed up by using JavaScript typed arrays with an int32 view to write into the image data buffer.