So, you're saying that the mythical HCF instruction[0] was somewhat real?
Yes, but it was more like 'loop and burn out a transistor'. No fire and no visible damage, just a cpu that wouldn't work any more. I didn't try it again to see if it was reproducible, it was a lot of money for me at the time and I considered myself pretty dumb for trying. A sample of '1' was enough to prove the point for me. I wished I recalled what drove me to try it, I'm fairly sure it was some outside influence, not something I came up with by myself and wondering 'what if'. More like: that's never going to work, here, let me show you. (Famous last words...)
Time for a lawsuit, I guess?
Debugging is your right, and destroying your hardware is not something the software may do.
I think you replied to the wrong person.
Well, you wrote about software you used trying "to directly damage the CPU."
That definitely sounds like malicious intent from the devs.
I was the dev, checking if this was actually possible. And - much to my surprise I might add - it was.
oh, interesting.
Still, it’s not really a great idea to damage your users’ systems. Liability and everything.
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Yes, I’m sorry, I had originally thought you were talking about the same as the parent you replied to: Software that tries to physically hurt your system when you try to debug it.
We can only be lucky that that isn’t possible today anymore, considering the fact that malware is widespread by now, it’d surely have used a "pay 20$ or your PC is dead" scheme otherwise.
On more modern CPUs this trick should not longer work but on quite a few 8 bit micros it definitely did (let's not go into how I know this and how I know the ca. 1987 list price of a 6809).