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Windows recovery environment and bootable USB creator in 200kb

(github.com)
195 points _ol1s | 5 comments | 27 Jul 24 02:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.7s | source
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torphedo ◴[27 Jul 24 03:45 UTC] No.41084297[source]▶
Wow, this is the largest batchfile I've ever seen! And I thought my 200-ish line one from high school was pushing it. Honestly huge respect for having the dedication to go this far with batch. I knew about the pseudo-function-calling features and a little bit of the weird syntax, but just skimming there's a lot of stuff in here I haven't seen before. Usually people saying "X in Y KiB" are doing some crazy linker shenanigans, so this was refreshing.

Also, "Windows To Go" and "Windows To Stay" are really funny feature names.

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1. Mogzol ◴[27 Jul 24 05:52 UTC] No.41084695[source]▶
Speaking of large batch files, if anyone has ever softmodded a Wii, there is a good chance you used ModMii, which is by far the largest batch program I've seen. The main script [1] is a batch file that clocks in at over a megabyte. I used to be pretty into the Wii modding scene and remember talking with the author of that script about random batch things a few times. I can't imagine maintaining a file that big.

[1] https://github.com/modmii/modmii.github.io/blob/master/Suppo...

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2. nyanpasu64 ◴[27 Jul 24 07:24 UTC] No.41084989[source]▶
It's sad that so many projects simply stopped updating a decade or more ago... the first 90% of work is building a USB loader and the second 90% is maintaining it, and neither the author nor I want to figure it out. I read online that SNEEK lets you screenshot games... it doesn't work (wrong filesystem? neek2o and sneek have a different feature set?). Also god all those Exception (DSI) and learning a decade later they were segfaults... yummy memory-unsafe embedded programming.

I found that ModMii leaked some global variables from a (failed) SNEEK install to a system menu mod('s help file), and being written in Batch certainly explains things...

3. sllabres ◴[27 Jul 24 10:25 UTC] No.41085606[source]▶
I once knew a (very old) old accounting system that had to work around a 64kB limit and therefor used a programmatically generated set of many hundreds batch files batch files calling each other (not containing the program logic of course). But each of them was less than 100 lines long.

But 27 kLOC for the WII thing or 3 kLOC for the recovery tool which even looks a bit more convoluted then the WII thing sounds interesting to maintain. On the other hand, if it works, no dependencies no 200 MB binary blob.

4. sunaookami ◴[27 Jul 24 10:54 UTC] No.41085711[source]▶
Don't forget that it even has a GUI made with Wizard's Apprentice which is created and controlled by a similar large batch file: https://github.com/modmii/modmii.github.io/blob/master/Suppo... :D
5. torphedo ◴[27 Jul 24 22:51 UTC] No.41089905[source]▶
21k loc, one file... dear god. that trumps it all, for sure. and wow, the repo is still getting active commits.