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How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

(cookieplmonster.github.io)
1371 points yett | 2 comments | 23 Apr 25 14:00 UTC | HN request time: 1.581s | source
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db48x ◴[23 Apr 25 14:32 UTC] No.43772686[source]▶
[flagged]
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mschuster91 ◴[23 Apr 25 14:43 UTC] No.43772801[source]▶
To u/db48x whose post got flagged and doesn't reappear despite me vouching for it as I think they have a point (at least for modern games): GTA San Andreas was released in 2004. Back then, YAML was in its infancy (2001) and JSON was only standardized informally in 2006, and XML wasn't something widely used outside of the Java world.

On top of that, the hardware requirements (256MB of system RAM, and the PlayStation 2 only had 32MB) made it enough of a challenge to get the game running at all. Throwing in a heavyweight parsing library for either of these three languages was out of the question.

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bluedino ◴[23 Apr 25 15:19 UTC] No.43773186[source]▶
Why weren't binary files used like I would expect in the 1990's DOS game? fread into a struct and all that
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1. epcoa ◴[23 Apr 25 15:27 UTC] No.43773266[source]▶
By the 2000s, portability was a concern for most titles. Certainly anything targeted at a rapidly changing console market back then.
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2. coldpie ◴[23 Apr 25 16:18 UTC] No.43773793[source]▶
Definitely, and architectures back then were far less standardized. The Xbox 360 was a big-endian PowerPC CPU, the PS2 had a custom RISC-based CPU. On the desktop, this was still the era of PowerPC-based Macs. Far easier (and I would argue safer) to use a standard, portable sscanf-like function with some ascii text, than figure out how to bake your binaries into every memory and CPU layout combination you might care about.