Unicorn Engine VS box64

OFRAK Tetris is a project I started at work about two weeks ago. It's a web-based game that works on desktop and mobile. I made it for my company to bring to events like DEF CON, and to promote our binary analysis and patching framework called OFRAK.

In the game, 32-bit, little-endian ARM assembly instructions fall, and you can modify the operands before executing them on a CPU emulator. There are two segments mapped – one for instructions, and one for data (though both have read, write, and execute permissions). Your score is a four byte signed integer stored at the virtual address pointed to by the R12 register, and the goal is to use the instructions that fall to make the score value in memory as high as possible. When it's game over, you can download your game as an ELF to relive the glory in GDB on your favorite ARM device.

The CPU emulator is a version of Unicorn (https://www.unicorn-engine.org/) that has been cross-compiled to WebAssembly (https://alexaltea.github.io/unicorn.js/), so everything on the page runs in the browser without the need for any complicated infrastructure on the back end.

Since I've only been working on this for a short period of time leading up to its debut at DEF CON, there are still many more features I'd eventually like to implement. These include adding support for other ISAs besides ARM, adding an instruction reference manual, and lots of little cleanups, bug fixes, and adjustments.

My highest score is 509,644,979, but my average is about 131,378.

I look forward to feedback, bug reports, feature requests, and strategy discussions!

Entails hundreds of hours of single-stepping through that opcode in Linux kernel using an indirect operand pointing toward its own opcode (self-modifying code).

Even the extraordinaire Fabrice Bellard (author of QEMU) admitted that it is broke and did a total rewrite, which fixed tons of other issues.

https://github.com/unicorn-engine/unicorn/issues/364

Macdu (Vita3K dev) also stated that this game is CPU bound so they used a CPU emulator known as unicorn2 , this is also the reason for the slow speed

This is how I found out a snippet of assembly code that can actually distinguished between a KVM hypervisor and most of today’s emulator.

https://github.com/unicorn-engine/unicorn/issues/364

Unicorn is missing from that list.

The python CPU emulator with full program counter (PC) and general (and other CPU-specific) register set controls.

I use it to catch fileless malware in the second fastest dynamic manner. Also good for detecting Rowhammer/SPECTRE behaviors.

Disclaimer: one of the contributors and a contractor that frequently deploy this.

https://github.com/unicorn-engine/unicorn

In the video, they mentioned they can't run steam on RISC-V because box64 doesn't support 32bit apps. In the README of box64, it is mentioned:

I see it can do more now, already tried some stuff. But see it is now more mature than months ago. Will try factorio again https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64/issues/665

Also, in the discussions of box64 is this thread: https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64/discussions/524 My guess is that you have to install both box64 and box86, the latest mesa drivers with vulkan support. And then try to launch the game with proton. There is also this issue that shows factorio running on a Rock 5B: https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86-compatibility-list/issues/284

In Box64, which is an emulator+JIT recompiler, and thus likely pretty slow?

macOS runs x64 executables just fine through Rosetta so I don't see why Wine couldn't make use of that hardware acceleration.

It's also possible to only simulate the entrypoints through Rosetta and then execute native aarch64 code from there. On Linux https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64 does exactly that, for example. However, with the performance Apple has been able to squeeze out of Rosetta, I'm not sure of that workaround is even necessary.

Recently, I got a server from Oracle Cloud, having 4 cores and 24GB of RAM. Then, using a software called Box86 and its 64 bit version called Box64, I succeeded in running Factorio! Unfortunately, 1.1.80 ran at 3 UPS! I went through each major version, testing each individual one down to 0.12. Here are my results!

You could try https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86 and https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64/ , I believe they allow you to emulate x86_64 on aarch64, though I have no experience with them, so cannot say for sure.

git clone https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64.git

If you have time and patience take a look at box86 and box64. These are basically like translation layers that allow x86/x86_64 applications to run on ARM. I personally haven't use them yet, so I can't provide a guide or vouch for game compatibilities. But by the look of the progress made by them so far it looks promising.

You can follow progress of this on https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64/issues/635