projects on DogThoughts.link

How I Archive

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 09:59:09 -0700

Saving Stuff

There is an infinite amount of print-locked media that most people will never, ever see. That media is locked up in basements, boxes, bookshelves. Most of the time, it’s only ever seen by one person, and only ever once if that. Nobody realizes how valuable a specific magazine issue or out of print book is until it’s proven to be a gap in world knowledge and cannot be found.

The Super Woopergun (MVS)

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 03:06:21 -0700

This is about the time I accidentally bought two Neo Geo MVS four slot boards. How do you accidentally buy two? I put down an initial bid of fifty bucks and nobody else came along to outbid me! I had to drive all the way down to San Diego to pick these things up too.

How do you use these things?

The NeoGeo MVS (henceforth just referred to as the MVS) is an arcade board designed to mount inside of an actual arcade cabinet. If you’ve ever seen a cabinet that looks like this:

PS1 Modchippin'

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 15:05:58 -0700

Got real in to modding the PS1 for some reason these past couple weeks. I haven’t really made anything new here, but I wanted to document my efforts anyway. All information on this page is only relevant to the fat PS1, not the PSone slims.

DRM in the Sony Playstation

As far as I am aware, There are a couple places where the Sony Playstation implements DRM checks. I must admit I am not an expert on this, and this information might not be completely accurate. I will cite sources wherever I can.

OpenBIOS on PS1 Hardware

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 21:04:03 -0700

Liberate your PS1!

Project Source Here: codeberg.org/kaybarkbark/ps1_bios_carriers

I love Libreboot. All my Thinkpads are Librebooted. If your machine has a closed source BIOS, you ain’t livin. While browsing the Libreboot wiki one day (as you do) I came across this page

Someone made a libre BIOS for the PS1? I had to give this a shot.

OpenBIOS

OpenBIOS is a super cool project maintained by the PCSX team. The PS1 BIOS is closed source and copyrighted, making it illegal to distribute. Unfortunately, it is also necessary for the system to function. You are legally allowed to desolder the mask ROM from your PS1, make a backup of it for use in emulators, and use it to play games (that you own of course) and you also legally backed up. This is a huge barrier to entry, however, and requires a bunch of hardware knowledge and the possibility of damaging your PS1. Another option is to reverse engineer the BIOS and write your own that mimics the behavior as close as physically possible (bugs and all). This is essentially what OpenBIOS is.

Automatic RP2350 Overclocking

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 19:31:50 -0700

Silicon is my main interest. I need tha hardware. GIMME HARDWARE. Firmware is fine and good, but hardware hacking is the most fun. Gotta push the chip to the limits and make it do stuff it wasn’t supposed to do. Make use of every gate on that chip! Why else are they there?

I’ve done a fair amount of overclocking with the Raspberry Pi RP2040. It’s actually super easy to overclock, and one of my designs (the Rick Roll SAO) relies on it to function. It’s pretty widely known in the community that you can push the clock speed chip pretty far without a whole lot of consequences.

DC32: Hardware Rick Roll

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 23:23:38 -0700

This idea has been done before, but I don’t think it’s been done so small! I shat this out in a week or so in the month leading up to DEF CON 32. It was so late we had to get them shipped directly to the hotel and had to assemble them there. DHL has screwed me before, not going to let a late package ruin everything again!

Opensauce Badge 2024

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 18:23:51 -0700

Open Sauce Badge 2024

Open Sauce is a super cool convention that takes place in the bay area. It’s kind of like a giant science fair, tons of people all bring the cool stuff they’re working on and show it off. The con is put on by William Osman and is visited by a bunch of other science and engineering YouTubers. Spiritually, it seems to fill the hole that Bay Area Maker Faire left after they closed up shop.

MBC5 Dev Cart Reverse Engineering

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 18:23:02 -0700

There will be more here soon. I got a cool dev cart in japan that I am trying to reverse engineer.

Giant Game Boy Camera

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 18:22:52 -0700

Giant Game Boy Camera

This was probably one of our most time consuming projects, and also the one we are most proud of. I worked on this with my partner Burry, under our group name DCPunks. We were fortunate enough to show it off at TWO conventions in the Bay Area, Further Confusion 2024 and Open Sauce 2024!

What is it?

It’s exactly what it seems like. A huge Game Boy camera kiosk that will print out your photo on a piece of sticker paper, just like the original! In case you didn’t know, the original Game Boy had two very interesting first party accessories: a camera and a printer. Both were sold officially by Nintendo. The camera allowed you to take very rudimentary photos and doodle on them with stickers. The printer would let you print our your photos on a small roll of thermal paper. The Giant Game Boy Camera recreates this functionality, just bigger and with a couple of enhancements.

GBPunk

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 17:17:32 -0700

GBPunk

https://github.com/kaybarkbark/gbpunk

This is the GBPunk. It’s a GameBoy ROM and RAM dumper I made with the new hot chip of the day, the RP2040. It works how I always thought these things should work, just plug it in and treat your cartridge like a flash drive. Pull off your ROM and save file, write a new save file to it, just drag and drop.

Some of the first projects I ever worked on were GameBoy centric. I cut my teeth overclocking DMGs, modding in backlights before IPSs were widely available, adding awful LEDs to the inside of clear console shells, and blasting sound through the tiny speaker with an amp that was way too powerful for it. The GameBoy isn’t even my favorite console, but it’s so interesting and hackable. Capable enough to have some decent games, but simple enough for a single engineer to wrap their head around. The Z80 (ok, technically Sharp SM83) gives it street cred too.

DC31: DCPunks Nuclear

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 23:58:32 -0700

We’ve Gone Nuclear

The return of the pink badge! We created another super simple, entry level badge for first timers at DEF CON. There’s not even a microcontroller! Just glue logic tied together to make a cool LED pattern

Designing with Glue Logic

You will be hard pressed to find a badge in this day and age that isn’t based around some kind of microcontroller. That is the easiest way to do it, and allows for a bunch of flexibility in your design. It’s also gotten extremely cheap to do, especially if you design everything around some nonstandard chinese micro.

DC31: DCPunks Hacker License

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 23:01:22 -0700

License to Hack

If you buy one of these, you can legally hack! Just show this to the FBI when they show up at your door, and remember to use incognito mode and legally nobody can touch you (Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and also this is all a lie).

This is an improved and G rated design of the Monster Fucker License from DEF CON 30. The LEDS light up with no batteries when you hold it near an NFC reader.

DC30: Thinkpad x200 SAO

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 23:19:39 -0700

ThinkPad x200 SAO

Are you even a hacker if you don’t do all your hackin’ on a 15 year old IBM thinkpad? These machines are extremely common at Defcon, every fourth person in line is probably holding one by the battery pack, trying to reverse engineer something in Ghidra.

A ThinkPad was an obvious choice for an SAO. I wanted to do something more interesting than just a blinky LED, so I threw a tiny OLED display on it and gave it just enough brains to talk to it.

DC30: Monster Fucker Badge

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 22:49:12 -0700

DEF CON 30 means DEF CON XXX, so we had to do something with that. That’s pretty much all there is to say about this one. I made a much better version of this for DEF CON 31 called the Hacker License

The Monster Fucker badges sold out pretty quick once we posted in the DCFurs Telegram

DC30: Defcon Punks 1 Badge

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 21:16:34 -0700

This is the first badge we made under the DC Punks group. The design ethos was simple hardware, ease of manufacturing, and low cost. DC Punks badges are for people who go to DEF CON for the first time, who may feel intimidated by more complicated projects. Badges get complicated and have tons of crazy puzzles, they can make you feel really dumb if you’re not in to the infosec scene already

DC29: BuggyBoy Badge

Mon, 10 May 2021 22:48:01 -0700

The BuggyBoy

While not the first badge I designed for DEF CON, this is the first one I ever sold. Also previous ones were tied to my name and revealing them here would doxx me. The BuggyBoy is a DTMF Encoder/Decoder with a full keypad that can make every DTMF tone. It’s nearly useless in a time like now when telephony signals are almost always out of band with voice, but I thought maybe it could be used to break elevator phones or something. Surely there is mischief to be had.