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Chapter 186: SSAS asks for a monthly pass

This meeting of the SAM Seven set an important plan for the next development of the SAM Association, and it was later recognized that this meeting was of great historical significance in the history of the development of the SAM Association. Pen % fun % Pavilion www.biquge.info

They were divided into software groups and hardware groups, and they acted separately.

The logos of Coca-Cola and Apple are relatively simple, and after being processed by image compression tools, the volume is already very small, so it does not take up much storage space.

However, in order to insert these image information into it, it is not possible to modify it directly through the buffer overflow as before, the original ROM must be dumped, and then put it in the "virtual machine" or "emulator" for modification.

Because his left hand was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the school's laboratory had all sorts of off-the-shelf equipment, he quickly dumped the original ROM of the Ti-82. However, there is no software to run the simulation calculator.

There was no way, so Lin Hong, Zuo Shou, and Torch began to write one such calculator simulator.

The idea of the simulator is to use software to simulate the hardware, and the characteristics of all hardware devices must be simulated.

In other words, there is basically no difference between running on an emulator and running on real hardware.

To put it bluntly, it's tricking the program into thinking it's running on real hardware. Many game emulators are like this, those games themselves can only run on designated devices, such as arcades, video game consoles, etc., but in the computer, you can let these game roms run in the emulator, so that you can play games with a computer.

Writing an emulator is a very challenging job that requires basic knowledge of assembly language as well as hardware.

These two points are not a problem for Lin Hong, the left hand and the torch.

So they simply divided the work and started writing the simulator.

Fortunately, most of the graphics and calculator manufacturers, including Texas Instruments, use the CPU of Zilog Z80, and this chip is very widely used, and the simulator code for it is ready-made, and some people put it on the network as open source code, which saves the three of them a lot of time.

With the trio working together, a simulator capable of running the TI-82 system was written in three days.

Due to the time constraints, a lot of the code has not been organized, and this emulator can only run the Ti-82 system for the time being, and when there is time to expand and improve it later, the ROMs in other calculators can also be run.

With the help of the simulator, Lin Hong's cracking of the calculator ROM is even more thorough.

When the calculator is started, it will display the logo of Texas Instruments, Lin Hong checked it through the tool, and found that the storage space is large enough to put the logos of Coca-Cola and Apple in it.

Originally, I wanted to keep the logo of Texas Instruments, but later Matthew said that the advertising effect might not be good, so he simply suggested that the logo of Texas Instruments be removed.

In this way, the Apple logo will be displayed first, then the Coca-Cola logo, and in the lower right corner of the display, it will be clearly indicated that this is a sponsored advertisement.

Lin Hong quickly did the first part of the upgrade program, just wait for Arthur and Atom's decompression program to come out, integrate it, and then upload it to the official FTP.

Next, Lin Hong began to study how to upgrade the calculator.

The first is memory, which is mainly divided into flash memory and RAM.

Flash memory is the hard disk of a computer and can store data, while RAM is memory, which has a great correlation with the speed of the operation of the program.

The TI-82 calculator comes standard with 512KB flash memory and 32KB RAM, and the system running on it can only recognize this size.

However, the flash memory and memory that can be found on the market are 2MB and 128KB respectively, and after some testing and improvement, Lin Hong successfully ported the latest flash memory and memory to his own calculator.

Now you can run programs like Tetris or Super Mario, which is very smooth and has the feeling of a shotgun change.

In addition, they found an industrial-grade infrared wireless transmitter from the market, which can reach 100 square meters and can be successfully matched with the TI-82 calculator.

After some improvements, the function of this calculator in Lin Hong's hand is already quite powerful.

If it weren't for the limitations of the calculator itself, it would be a handheld computer, and it also has a wireless transmission function, which is more powerful than all the laptops on the market.

The hardware group is going very well, but the software group is having a hard time.

Since Arthur and Atom had not been exposed to the knowledge of compression and decompression before, and this part involved more complex algorithm problems, both of them felt that it was difficult to understand and implement the principles of algorithms.

What's more, Lin Hong has already given them a good indicator before, stipulating how many lines of code their decoder cannot have, otherwise it will be meaningless to integrate into the upgrade program.

As a result, a few days later, they had just implemented the PC code for the decompression program. The volume is very large, several times more than the indicators given by Lin Hong, and after many times of streamlining, it still cannot meet the requirements.

The hardware went well, and then they started to make a wireless transmitter and receiver that could be connected to a computer, and after Matthew consulted the Torch and the left hand, he asked Lin Hong to transfer to the software group to help develop the decompression program, which greatly reduced the pressure on Arthur and Atom.

Unconsciously, Lin Hong has become a recognized master of software and hardware in everyone's hearts, and there is never anything that cannot be completed in his hands.

To Arthur and Atom's envy and shock, Lin Hong seemed to have a natural feeling for the algorithm, and there was no obstacle to understanding it at all, and when implementing the code, he could also draw inferences from one another, and make significant changes to the code they had written before, and soon, the uncompressed code that met the requirements was naturally released, and after Lin Hong integrated it with other codes, the second version of the cracked program was finally successfully introduced.

Lin Hong studied the compression and decompression algorithm this time, and the harvest was very huge, he had never been exposed to this aspect before, and he only had a vague concept of the principle in his heart, when he really studied it in depth this time, he found that the charm contained in it was very huge.

Data compression is indeed a very wonderful thing, and whenever he thinks that a string of arbitrary data can be converted into only one-fifth or even one-half of the original length according to certain rules, and can be restored to the original state according to the corresponding rules, it is an incredible feeling.

Computers are inherently beautiful and very simple, and the design of data compression is simpler and more beautiful.

By simplicity, we don't mean the difficulty, but the performance.

When Lin Hong was studying data compression, he gradually formed a vague concept in his mind - the simpler the thing, the more beautiful it is.

Due to the comparative and systematic study and research of data compression, Lin Hong optimized his cracked program again, and the size of the optimized program was only about half of the previous one, which can be said to have reached the extreme.

When the rest of the SAM Association downloaded the latest cracked program from the internal FTP, they simply wondered if they had placed the wrong file.

Although the cracked program has been released, the SAM Association did not release it immediately, but once again after many discussions, it was optimized from the function.

Because considering that the sponsor may change frequently, Lin Hong later improved the code of the advertising part and changed it to use special instructions to modify it synchronously, so that once the sponsor changes, they can also replace and cancel the advertisement at any time. Of course, the premise is that the user has to synchronize his or her calculator with the relay server.

In this way, the simple sponsored advertising was upgraded to an advertising system, which Matthew named "SSAS", which means "SAM sponsored advertising system".

Moreover, Matthew also strongly recommends including a statistical code in it.

The function of this code is very simple, it is to collect the unique product identification code of the cracked calculator, this code is unique, and each calculator is different. Once the user connects with the cracked calculator, it will automatically send its own unique product identifier to the relay server, and when the intermediary server connects to the main server, it will upload the collected identifier code to the main server.

In this way, you can know how many calculators have downloaded the cracker to crack it.

The reason why the statistics are made is purely so that Matthew can have a more accurate number when lobbying for merchants, so that they can pay attention to the "SSAS" advertising system.

Matthew has high hopes for this advertising system, believing that it is a subversion of traditional sponsored advertising, and believes that it will be an important source of input for SAM in the future. The theory that underpins his theory is that as many people in the U.S. buy calculators as there are potential customers for these ads, which is much more reliable than the Internet advertising that is just emerging today. You know, there are a lot of people who are already boasting about how Internet advertising will disrupt traditional media advertising.

The rest of Sam didn't feel much about it, they were only concerned with technology, and as for the business side, let Matthew worry about it.

The two of them, Left Hand and Torch, also went very well on the infrared-sync peripherals for the calculator-to-computer, and soon made a prototype, and then began to refine and optimize it, as well as write the accompanying software.

This time, the SAM Association made a big move, and everyone was confident in it. And it was unanimously decided to get everything ready before April Fool's Day came on April 1st

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