Posts by BFeely

Re: when the answer comes right out of nowhere

It was likely used for that purpose because Windows Media Player would color-key to a super dark, nearly black magenta. This was on pre-Vista PCs. I discovered this trick on an early 2000s laptop when playing around with screenshotting a DVD and pasting it into Paint.

Anyone could spin up an overlay using DirectDraw. You'd create an overlay surface, define the color key, and send data/flip it using the correct YUV format. In my own experiments I had used the packed UYVY format.

Windows Vista removed support for these video overlays due to conflicting with the Direct3D based Desktop Window Manager. DRM video today uses a newer overlay format that is seamlessly composited by DWM but when you take a screenshot the video gets blacked out, but any playback controls that were overlaid still rendered in the screenshot. Also, since Windows 7 with a simple API you can declare any top-level window to be DRMed with a single API call, and will be blacked out from any screenshots, or even hidden entirely.

Re: Hang on a sec

Back in the day my dad showed me the BASIC programming language on the VIC-20. Would that be considered hacking today?

Re: *!$#&@ Bluetooth

The keyboard error actually dates back to the original behavior of the A20 gate on 32/16-bit x86 processors where the gate (which switched between 8086 emulated mode and 80286 style high memory mode) was controlled by the keyboard controller. Hence you had to connect a keyboard and press F1 to let the BIOS know there is a working keyboard to operate the gate.

It was a very hacky method which later moved inside the processor silicon before apparently becoming entirely removed (though some sources just say it no longer has a physical A20 gate output but still emulates it).

Way too many news outlets are clickbaiting on this. Remote Desktop Connection is far more fleshed out than Remote Desktop on Microsoft Store for connecting to Windows Pro and up PCs.

Re: You should never need to reboot a machine.

Looking at this reply it would appear your Server 2022 also has virtualization based security, and only a tiny memory window exists to read syscalls. The reduction might be that you stressed your memory and the blocks that the kernel isn't using got swapped out.

Re: Long Time VirtualBox User

VMWare Workstation has full support for running under the Windows 10/11 hypervisor, but VirtualBox seems to be still very much broken.

Re: The unthinkable option...

Or perhaps mounted to a helicopter for a Texas feral pig slaughter?

Re: VirtualBox with Hyper-V, please

While VMWare bridged networking does seem to be a house of cards, falling over if my USB hub running my secondary NIC resets or getting in an apparent standoff with the Hyper-V network bridge, it is my go-to for interactive VMs.

As for USB I can easily attach my webcam to a Windows 11 VM to use it for telehealth visits, as I have some weird gremlins on my host OS that keep causing those sessions to disconnect.

With all that said I'd better consider VirtualBox if it did support running on systems with Hyper-V virtualization which is even more likely to be the case with modern Windows 11 systems due to the hypervisor based security features.