Introducing acropalypse: a serious privacy vulnerability in the Google Pixel's inbuilt screenshot editing tool, Markup, enabling partial recovery of the original, unedited image data of a cropped and/or redacted screenshot. Huge thanks to for his help throughout!
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Simon Aarons
@ItsSimonTime
I do programming, reverse engineering, security research, media preservation and will beat you at Mario Kart | Mr Acropalypse | 21 | he/him | 
Simon Aarons’s posts
Random fun fact: the track "This is a Test" from 1080° Snowboarding (N64) has a sample of a voice saying "homosexuality" over and over again.
This was only present in the Japanese version and the CD soundtrack release, as it was caught during the English localisation and removed.
This is completely and utterly untrue, there is no obscure life-limited hardware part of the Switch, you can keep enjoying Pokémon Sword & Shield without any brick risk.
I keep seeing rumours about there being a cryptominer in Cooking Mama: Cookstar, and due to its inclusion, it was pulled from the eShop.
After some RE work, I can safely say there is no cryptominer/blockchain stuff anywhere within Cooking Mama: Cookstar's code.
Nintendo has just issued multiple DMCA takedown requests to GitHub, including for Lockpick, the tool for dumping keys from YOUR OWN Switch, which is absolutely ludicrous - pirates aren't gonna be sourcing keys from their own consoles!
github.zendesk.com/attachments/to
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Oh yeah—just to be 100% clear, both of the alleged issues described in the screenshots were completely fabricated and have no basis of truth whatsoever to them
PIKO Interactive is the worst kind of scum, destroying video game preservation with every IP they get their hands onto and ultimately never release, as well as send legal threats to those who dump and release prototype ROMs of the games they (claim to have) bought the rights to
Nintendo has quietly pulled Switch update 12.0.3 for unknown reasons
SUPERHOT for Switch just got an update... but they haven't even announced its release yet
I have located, dumped and preserved the only remaining undumped US Nintendo DS kiosk demo!
Pokémon Dash's demo is so incredibly rare (previously only 1 known copy in the world!) that nobody has managed to find nor dump it until now.
Get it here:
Just found a screenshot of the desktop of my first computer, circa September 2008
I'm sorry WHAT, Nintendo's new game "The Stretchers" has just been sitting there for over half a year
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Lockpick only dumps console keys and digital game keys, Tears of the Kingdom was leaked from a physical cartridge
it depends on a few factors but given there's 6 years of images my guess would be "pretty fucked"
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Correction: it was caught *during* the development of the game and is thus only present in the soundtrack version, not in-game.
Sorry for the confusion!
Nintendo are starting to crack down on pre-release datamining, patch data's tickets are no longer available to download early, meaning you can't decrypt the title
Introducing Brovicon: an easy-to-use, free, broadcast-quality video converter which performs state-of-the-art deinterlacing, frame rate/standards conversion, upscaling and downscaling!
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the blue tick will be a month-long reminder not to use twitter whilst under the influence
A demo is now available at
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I'll add information regarding the other repositories taken down as soon as I find out what they are!
All SNES game strings have been removed from the latest NES Online update.
Took some better quality photos of the 3DS dev carts released by
An FAQ, demo and a technical write-up coming shortly!
The Switch-exclusive Steins;Gate elite pre-order bonus "8-bit Adventure Steins;Gate" is actually an NES ROM!
Here's some screenshots of it running in an NES emulator:
I am responsible for this hoax 😭 how it spread outside a discord server is anyone's guess
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this entire unused switch shop theme thing was a hoax by the way, after having spent hours looking through old switch firmwares, I couldn't find a single trace of this theme. there is no evidence pointing to the idea of this being used for the eShop at some point. twitter.com/NintendoMusicz…
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Yeah the strikes were issued by this manchild
I've been poking at 3D Classics: Kirby's Adventure as research for my Arika custom file format extraction tools, and it turns out it's a full C++ recreation of the original game and not an emulated NES ROM!?
Interesting that these are in the Switch demo of Katamari Damacy Reroll...
Just realised the alt text got swallowed up when I updated the diagram in the draft tweet...
Image description: A three-panel diagram.
The first panel is titled "Discord message" and depicts a Discord message sent by SimonTime to Retr0id, with an attached cropped photo of a… Show more
they do now, but unfortunately screenshots uploaded before January on Discord are vulnerable as the fix isn't retroactive
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Furthermore, it's only present in the Japanese "Nintendo 64 Sound Series" soundtrack release; all the tracks are high quality and made from the original samples.
The US Nintendo Power release cuts the line incidentally, as it's a lazy release (low quality recordings from an N64).
The new Switch NES & SNES Online updates added BCAT functionality, which means Nintendo can push new content anytime without updating the application itself.
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It was most likely something licensing or rating-related, nothing out of the ordinary in the code, just standard stuff you'd see in a 3D Unity game.
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They pulled that announcement from the site in 2019 yet people still seem to take it as gospel
Konami's Arcade Classics Anniversary Collection seems to use music ripped by fans onto YouTube, converted to DSP-ADPCM, therefore the quality is absolutely horrible and laced with nasty compression artifacts.
Take a look at this spectrogram (barring the ADPCM aliasing):
There are doubts as to whether these strikes were actually issued by Nintendo or not
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Replying to @ItsSimonTime
Lockpick has now officially been taken down, I can also now reveal that all the other repositories subject to the DMCA takedown strikes were hosting the key files themselves
ever had the insatiable urge to write an emulator for the Tiger game•com?
Final Fantasy VIII Remastered appears to be a poorly done decompilation using some form of x86 emulation, with all functions named sub_0x(address) and taking in an x86_context *, as we can see from the symbols in the unstripped NRO:
This is no longer true! Discord is now performing CDN-side sanitation of PNGs!
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Replying to @BgJxSIaS1XLRWcl and @David3141593
they do now, but unfortunately screenshots uploaded before January on Discord are vulnerable as the fix isn't retroactive
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Lockpick has now officially been taken down, I can also now reveal that all the other repositories subject to the DMCA takedown strikes were hosting the key files themselves
I finally managed to break the crypto Super Mario Maker 2 uses for encrypting its courses and their associated replay data and thumbnails!
Decryptor thingy coming in a day or so once I clean up the code!
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Games are only have NAND write access to their allocated savedata space and that's it, which SwSh uses for savedata only, so this is also completely untrue
Sonic The Hedgehog (2006, Xbox 360/PS3) uses Wii U8 archives to store most of its files, despite never being released for Wii...
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they haven't removed the update data from the servers, but the server which tells the Switch which version to download has reverted back to 12.0.2
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Luckily not just yet, they give you a one day grace period before removing the repo automatically
who needs musicians anymore, now we have an AI capable of replicating the result of a five-year-old getting a toy keyboard for Christmas
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Creators and Musicians are going to love this.
It's ChatGPT-4 for Music and editing.
This is the craziest music tool I've seen so far 
Super Mario Maker 2 has over 2 GB of pure music, over 70% of its total file size.
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I don't know yet unfortunately, I only know about this because I forked it and got the email early
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The update was added to the Switch's version list, which is what the device downloads around every 4 hours for background game updates.
I ripped all of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System - Nintendo Switch Online box art to PNG:
mega.nz/file/KA5kSCJS#
The new NES Online update has the English box art for Super Mario Bros. Lost Levels in (I believe) the highest quality it's ever been seen:
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Yeah it's utterly pathetic behaviour, do these people just not have anything better to do with their time?
damn you really can say any old bullshit on this site and people will believe you
This has gotta be a DSP emulation bug
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They just straight up replaced the original sound effect with a censor beep???????????????
it isn't very marvelous of you :(
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Actually, I stand corrected.
The first rip I found on YouTube sounds WAY better than the rip used by Konami in their collection.
Interesting tidbit: the 3 new games added in SNES NSO v1.4.0 have nonsequential ids with the highest being 2140, this means they managed to get over 100 games in a working state.
Luigi's Mansion 3 just received a day -1 (or day -2 depending on where you live) patch:
Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit stores all of its assets in ZIP file (data . zip)
8.0.0 added another feature that's unlisted in Nintendo's patch notes:
The selector position on the home menu now rotates;
Moving left on the leftmost app icon on the home screen will now roll the selector over to the rightmost icon (or all software), and vice-versa!
Finally cracked that mysterious third compression type in Mario Tennis Aces:
