(Discussion of this post is up on 0x10cforum.com)

WARNING: The following post contains lots of technical mumbo-jumbo for those not computer savvy. If you don’t like getting headaches, I recommend not reading on.

Before I begin, I have to point out some things I am assuming about the game.

• That CPUs do not have any storage mediums (like hard drives or persistent RAM) other than floppies.
• That floppies can be freely removed and inserted at any point when code is running, like an actual computer.
• That the CPU is the “core” to the spaceship, which handles everything from air control to navigation.

Ok, so, we have our 0x10c CPU, which runs the spaceship that allow us to continue living in the vast emptiness of space. Without that CPU handling everything, our ship is inevitably going to crash or fail to keep pumping out air to breathe. So disabling or tampering with another player’s CPU could be one of the quickest ways to get rid of them.

Now, floppies are the main way data in loaded into a CPU. You stick it in, the CPU loads it up, and it starts running whatever. Likewise, if you want to get a virus placed into a CPU, the most direct way is to put it on a floppy and load it in a CPU. But, what if all you had to do to remove a virus was press a button? Wouldn’t that make viruses useless?

That’s not what I want. I want viruses to be terrifying, destructive, and hard to remove. I want new viruses coming out every week. I don’t want viruses to be easy to prevent, and I don’t want someone to be immune to the threat of viruses.

In the late 1980s, there really was no such thing as trusted code. CPUs did what they were programmed to. That’s all. It didn’t matter if the code was safe or malicious. There weren’t any real safeguards to prevent code from being bad.

So, here are a few suggestions I have for 0x10c, along with my reasoning.

1. Don’t have code be read-only in memory, and don’t prevent code from executing in certain areas of memory.
   • Real 16-bit CPUs were like this. Everything in memory, including data structures, could be run as code, even if it shouldn’t. Code could even modify itself. For developers, it could lead to hilarious bugs from poor code. For viruses, this would allow them to modify running code and let them piggyback off of them, making players believe everything is fine until it’s too late.
2. Don’t allow players to clear memory or reboot CPUs, at least not without a major threat, consequence, or cost.
   • For a paranoid player with an instant reboot button, they could become basically immune to viruses, because viruses must be predominantly memory resident, as floppies are the only form of data storage and those are never guaranteed to be in the system. It also detracts from the fact that the CPU is basically the brain of your spaceship, and a spaceship needs to be running all time, at the very least for life-support. It’d be fine if it reset after a respawn, or doing so made the ship vulnerable to attack for an extended period, etc.
3. Load code from floppies without requiring the code in the CPU to do it.
   • This allows the data loader to become standardized, at the very least for OSes and viruses. In real life floppy drives, the first sector of the floppy is loaded, and the last word of the sector is checked for a specific value. If it matched, the sector is run as code. Also, this allows people to write programs without having to write the de-facto data loader for every single program to avoid the consequences of CPU reboot. (Remember, programs designed for a specific OS will have to follow the OS’s own loader!)
4. Loading code does not reset the CPU, instead it pauses the current code and allows the program to continue it at its discretion.
   • This would allow viruses to infect the application currently running in the CPU, or allow a diagnostic program to check the status of the CPU for abnormalities before letting it resume with whatever it’s doing.
5. Don’t allow floppies to be set read-only.
   • Viruses being spread by hand is great, but allowing viruses to spread from infected CPUs to clean CPUs by infected floppies is even better! But if you can read-only a floppy, then there won’t be any risk of cross contamination if everyone sets read-only… I wouldn’t mind hard-to-find floppies that can only be written to once, though!
6. Have certain components of the ship be vulnerable to back-door attacks, but have ways to negate that threat as well.
   • An example: Let’s say the predominant way ships communicate is by subspace sensors. Why not have a back-door with malformed subspace packets that can only be prevented with a subspace shield?
7. Allow code to change component settings that are unwise or dangerous.
   • Another example: Let’s say that players can only live in an environment between 15.6 degrees Celcius and 29.4 degrees Celcius. Why not have the life-support system be able to go up to 200 degrees Celcius? Melted people everywhere!
8. Don’t give code a way to completely prevent infections.
   • There are a couple ways to prevent infections such as: preventing removing the current floppy from the drive, or making the current program the only way to load data, and in order to load data, you must supply a password. This makes things too hard to infect a CPU, don’t let it happen!

I am now using this thing called Tumblr. Hopefully I won’t poke an eye out with it.