One of my proudest moments in college was forged from a case of Mnt Dew, a copy of Asheron’s Call, SoftICE, a friend’s Cyrix 686, and a technical note poorly Google-translated from French.

Over the course of a single night, we were able to determine that Asheron’s Call crashed on the Cyrix 686 because it didn’t implement the RDTSC (Read Timestamp Counter) instruction supported by Intel chips. But thanks to someone fluent in French (and Google’s primitive ability to do French to English word substitution), we found out that the RDTSC instruction was not necessarily critical to a program’s execution and could be patched with two no-ops (a no-op being a single byte instruction, and RDTSC spanning two).

Unfortunately, we were not sophisticated enough to update the excecutable file on disk. We tried a basic find and replace of RDTSC to no-ops, but that was pretty close to trying to cure alcohol poisoning with tequila.

Luckily, I had access to SoftICE. SoftICE sits right under the OS and catches low level events, popping up a nifty text-based UI on demand. Besides the more commonly used interactive mode, it could also run scripts for different triggers.

In our case, the trigger was the illegal instruction exception. When the processor trapped an illegal instruction, we simply checked the value of memory at the instruction pointer and, if it was RDTSC, write two no-ops in its place. After that, we could resume program execution. Performance was a nonissue, since each RDTSC instruction had to be patched no more than once.

(Fun fact, on Intel processors there are two levels of exception handlers. If an exception is raised, the first line exception handler is invoked. If an exception is raised in the exception handler, a second handler is called. If an exception happens once more before the inner most handler can return a triple fault is said to have occured and the CPU does a soft reboot.)

In the end, Asheron’s call ran on one of what I can only imagine is a limited number of Cyrix 686 processors, and I remember distinctly thinking, as I walked out of the dorms into the morning light, how I could feel my eyeballs shot through with light-sensitve pain.