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TOCA 2 Cheats

Made a list of cheat codes for TOCA 2
Yes, All of them
List might take a few sec to load
But hopguly it gets indexed my something
And so people can more easly find the codes
as the bs "pay for chests" service is long since dead
TOCA 2 Xbox Cheats

Work

Stuck between working to much an not enough
And to tired to do anything about it.
Just need the money.
Time == money
We sell the time for money
But I need that time to do things
But I can't do the things without the money

Why did I make this?

I spent like 4 hours last night reviving the RSS feed for the UnleashX dashboard.
So why am I questioning my sanity... more than usual.
Well because of the way I build things a lot of the time they can’t be public so eg. Last year some time I built a fully automated bot for Mega.nz, Can’t make that public, they will block it and I need to use it. A few months back I built a script to dump and recompile map data from a dayz mapping website, and faire enough the site owner didn’t want that to be public either. And the other day in another fit of ADHD I was screwing around in the UnleashX Config.xml located on the C drive of your xbox if your running the UnleashX dash. I don’t even remember why I was there but I stumbled across the RSS feed settings. And found out you can set a custom endpoint, It was already set to xbox-hq but at some point in the last 15 or so years, they updated there RSS feed and it's no longer compatible with the xboxs archaic RSS reader, soo lets make our own. After about 30 secs of googleing I found a nice consolemods.org wiki that basically explained the hole thing. So I just hippity hoppity your code is now my property’ed it, smashed a php up on my local web server and bam, working RSS feed again.

Yeah I have no idea why the /item and /title tags are backwards and at this point I’m too scared to fix it or even try to change it.
That’s all well and good MobCat, but how do you get the text into the RSS feed?
Well good question. With much pain.

As this is a php script that prints out html scrip for reasons I guess, If you where the site admin you could just plug the php into your database and bam easy RSS feed, we are not the web admin of this site so we have to get the data another way. Right now I’m pulling data from a json file in the hope that not editing the php directly would cause the page not to be there when the xbox calls for it. It kinda worked but instead of the php not being there, the json isn’t there and only half the page loads, but something at least shows on the xbox and you only have a like 1 in 30 chance of it braking like this and there are other issues we'll get into so “it’s fine” for now.
So how are we getting the site data? Right, yeah as I said I can’t and don’t want to get into it to much as I don’t want everyone to start slamming there site, and TBH it would be better if the team just had their own php script to do this but yeah, python, how else.

So it’s a really bad script that uses requests to slurp all the data, BeautifulSoup4 to do some bad filtering on it, then we chuck all that data, line by line while adding formatting, into a json file. This is super the wrong way of doing this, there should be a nicer way of getting a list and saving it as a json but idk how and this “just works” for the most part.
Part of that bad filtering fails on trying to convert spaces into numbers, so it runs for a few hours, it wigs out and doesn’t slurp the data right, finds a space and crashes.
This is why the 1 in 30 thing wasn’t so bad as it not even being able to filter the data properly is more of an issue. And on top of that, it appears the xbox only pulls down a clean / new RSS feed on cold boot, so the reboot thing doesn't work. And the dashboard itself seems to be sporadic on when it goes and grabs a new feed, seems to be once every few mins, but sometimes it won’t update for 20 mins. Which is not ideal for this use case of accurate player counts so you know what game to play next.
Well this was a fun project / waste of time, and I do wanna look at more RSS stuff, maybe get back into the YouTube RSS thing but for now ima call it here for today. Gonna start making this blog thing more public from now on and seeing if I can improve it with more iframes and stuff but yeah I’m excited for whatever comes of this.

20221122

Todays music.

Let's ballance out that melodrama with some music then.

20221121

All password files are bad?

I saw this “interesting” tweet today.
It did go into a mini thread but I’ll just sum it up here
As someone who pirates and uploads these files there’s a lot to break down here But TL;DR this is like throwing the baby out with the bath water. Not all passworded archives are bad, and there are a lot of legitimate reasons to upload a passworded file so let’s go over a few of them.
First up though yeah, caution and due diligence is still needed on your part with anything internet related, if some random just DM's you a link unsolicited with a password then it might be bad, more so if they don't want to give you the password right away. But the chances of you, also a random, running into this is rare.
The OP of this tweet was worried about me legitimizing scammers using passworded files, but again if some random DMs you well yeah use "common sense". I use quotes as common sense is dead, so I guess use your internet street smarts then kids. If it’s too good to be true, then it is. Why is this person DMing me with this at this time? Like no really why.
Question everything.
I can't and don't want to speak for scammers but uploading files in bulk now days isn’t as hard as you think. if the file is under a few GB then there are hundreds of free hosts out there, some of them don't even need accounts. And making an account with a generated email is easy too. Sure, you can report the link to the file host. But these hosts get thousands of reports a day, they either already know about it or the bad actor has already re-uploaded it 50 times to 12 different hosts. So reporting it will only make you feel better, it won’t do much.
Thoughts and prayers and all.
What was I getting at?.. Right, legitimate pirate reasons.
So why would a pirate put a password on their archive? Well there are a bunch of reasons. The most common and easiest to explain is link stealing.
Uploaders go through a lot of work to obtain these files, testing and cracking them, package them, upload them, and then maintaining these links, as they will commonly go down within 6~12 months depending on the traffic they are receiving.
All of this is uploaded for free to a forum or other site for you to download for free.
So it sucks when someone comes along, copys your link, sticks it on their site, there site gets wayyy more hits than yours, the link gets flagged and taken down by the host. And your sitting there like, hay my link only got 12 hits, why is it down already. So if someone steals your password link, they would also have to steal your MobCat@nextgenroms.com password as well, hopefully giving credit to the uploader and driving people back to where the link was stolen from.
On the flip side of this, if you steal someone else’s link and upload it to somewhere else, you have absolutely no control over that link, you have no idea what's in it, you didn’t pack it, if the link goes down, you’re not going to re-upload it. Nor can you. You just dumped a link on another forum for quick cloute, and that's a dick move.
I feel like I have rambled a little to much so let’s wrap this up.
Last few reasons would be it's fairly common for windows and even chrome to scan and auto flag bad files, This is somewhat common with windows game cracks but even then you need to unpack it to play the game so its not going to stop someone infecting your computer if they really want to.
Another reason would be the really shit hosts out there that will automatically run scans inside archives to check for things that violate their ToS, but if this is the case then they will probably already ban you for other reasons. Legitimate or not. Thankfully these types of hosts are rare and we don’t have to deal with them too much. and as I alluded to above, uploading your file 50 times to 12 different hosts isn’t that hard now days either. Passwording an archive isn’t the answer or solution to all problems, it’s just another tool. This would be like saying that anyone that sends you a base64 encoded link is automatically a virus.
Tools can always be used and abused by stupid people. That’s there right as stupid people.

20221121

Added even more LEDs to the gamer box

The left LED is LAN activity and the right LED is HDD activity. LAN LED was easy, we just tacked an LED onto the LED that was already inside the LAN connector. The HDD activity LED was kinda wacked.
We are tapping into "activity -" on the IDE connecter. But this is a negative voltage, we need to get a positive from somewhere? In theory we should be able to also pull this from the IDE connecter but I guess not. And any of the guides I looked up basically just stole 12v right from the PSU. Which is overkill for this. So I tapped into the 3.3v line from the LPC header used for modchips. I do have a modchip installed but there are multiple lines in this LPC header.
I might go into more details later, but for now I’m going to try and keep these posts short ish.

20221120