Unicorn Engine VS MicroPython

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

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

Actually, that gives me an idea. Unicorn Engine (https://github.com/unicorn-engine/unicorn) is FOSS and claims to be able to emulate many CPU architectures like x86. Do you think it could be possible to just run a regular Hackintosh setup through Unicorn Engine‘s x86 emulator? Definitely it would be very slow, and there is chance that it will just not work, but that would make the process fairly easy as Hackintosh setup is pretty well documented. Though I have to admit that I only just found Unicorn Engine and I can find almost no documentation for it other than on their github. I would be a bit skeptical of unicorn engine, but do you think that this could be possible?

https://www.unicorn-engine.org/ for example.

This is the PR where the work is being merged into ‘upstream’ micropython for those who are interested. I have been following this side February. Very interesting to see https://github.com/micropython/micropython/pull/10739

On a larger project like this, it generally feels like new build features that take any of us a couple of hours to get working in make, might take a couple of days to replicate on cmake. One recent example of this is build variants: https://github.com/micropython/micropython/pull/9056

On bare metal/RTOS embedded platforms, the scripting language is used instead of C/C++ to program the device. Common examples are Lua and Micropython, but JavaScript and Ruby have also been used this way.

I now use Python everywhere. Desktop (PySide), embedded (MicroPython), web dev (React via Transcrypt), mobile (Kivy), and just general scripting. I love the versatility of Python, the ease of reading it without the visual cruft of other languages, and the availability of existing libraries that do just about everything you can think of. I also agree with the OP on the welcoming attitude of the Python community. The fact that Python is used in so many different areas leads to many new learning experiences when talking to other Python developers.

I would suggest that installing and using MicroPython to do this would be much easier.

I already flashed esp32-20230426-v1.20.0.bin file I got from micropython.org, but for some bizzare reason I cannot seem to be able to connect to the board with anything that isn't Arduino IDE Serial Monitor. Serial connection is some noname esp32-cam-mb board.

Also, it looks like you're writing to the flash every second the engine is running. Do you have an idea of what the endurance of that might be? I'm not too familiar with this but supposedly the flash on the Pico is good for at least 100K program/erase cycles and Micropython uses LittleFS on RP2040 which does wear leveling. I looked for more official info and the rp2 port code backs that up with a note: "the flash requires the programming size to be aligned to 256 bytes". And the littlefs readme does say it does wear leveling and other good stuff.

I'm aware of two versions of Python for microcontrollers. Micro Python and Circuit Python

You might want to try looking at which Micropython ports support which RTC methods by looking at machine_rtc.c in the source for each port. The Pico is under "rp2".