That's pretty amazing by itself. But it was doing it without access to the source code that blew me away.

That really is the cherry on top.

Ya know on second thought, it's so unbelievable that he did this whole thing that I wouldn't be surprised if someone reading his resume thought he was bullshitting.

Althought it is impressive, it isn't that uncommon in the reverse engineering world and quite believable imo.

And that's why you have source in your resume.

Gamers playing this game have all kinds of tricks to try to bypass the load screen itself because it takes a long time to go through it but the game by design forces you to look at the load screen multiple times just to do one task. One way that I remember was to play in a Solo session that way you don't have to load every time you come out of multiplayer. They even make a GTA online software tool that blocks GTA on the firewall at very specific intervals to force an online session in order to speed up load times.

There should be such tricks for Codemasters' games specifically and PS1/PSP/Vita games in general. All those intro screens and warnings are absolute bullshit, just publishers spitting in gamers' faces.

Unfortunately he will flunk the interview after failing to invert a binary tree..

I know it's tongue in cheek, but shouldn't you use a more difficult example? Inverting a binary tree is trivial. (Example solution: https://leetcode.com/problems/invert-binary-tree/discuss/111...)

It's a reference to the engineer that created homebrew but failed a google interview where they asked him that question: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?s=20

Not worth working there anyways.

It's truly amazing that he did all this while decompiling the source code, but for engineers working on a large system it's not that uncommon to fix large impact performance bugs.

Just today I improved performance of an enterprise system by over 15000% by commenting out a "sleep(1);" line I used to debug a race condition!

Might not put that one on the resume.

One person. Only one person gets to say that.

"...without working for Rockstar"

Is the resume where all cool accomplishments go after they've faded from the public eye? Your comment struck me as somehow extremely (and unintentionally) fatalistic... that this cool hack will somehow end up churned through the capitalistic society into a bullet point to earn a wage. Actually kind of depressing.

Well, what else should the fate of this achievement be? Very few achievements are immortalized.

I don't think it's got anything to do with capitalism, we just tend to forget things quickly.

I’m sure ZA/UM is hiring.

One.

Sans source code to boot!