Kacper Słomiński qookei

Making a PDF + Bootable ISO Hybrid Polyglot

If you've not seen my résumé, that is what this post is about, and you should probably look at it first to get an idea of what's happening.

A Tale of Two Files

PDF and ISO9660 are two very different file formats. PDF is actually a surprisingly human-readable (but, sadly, not very human-writable) plain-text format, technically descended from PostScript. PDF is not very forgiving on changes, as it stores tables of offsets to various elements, so it is very difficult to insert or remove content manually without going through a robust PDF manipulation library.

ISO9660 is a disk filesystem, meant to be written once and read many times on many different kinds of hardware. As it is sector-based, it expects data structures to be at particular absolute offsets.

A guide to ANSI on Discord

Discord is now slowly rolling out the ability to send colored messages within code blocks. It uses the ANSI color codes, so if you've tried to print colored text in your terminal or console with Python or other languages then it will be easy for you.

Quick Explanation

To be able to send a colored text, you need to use the ansi language for your code block and provide a prefix of this format before writing your text:

\u001b[{format};{color}m

	;SMBDIS.ASM - A COMPREHENSIVE SUPER MARIO BROS. DISASSEMBLY
	;by doppelganger ([email protected])

	;This file is provided for your own use as-is. It will require the character rom data
	;and an iNES file header to get it to work.

	;There are so many people I have to thank for this, that taking all the credit for
	;myself would be an unforgivable act of arrogance. Without their help this would
	;probably not be possible. So I thank all the peeps in the nesdev scene whose insight into
	;the 6502 and the NES helped me learn how it works (you guys know who you are, there's no

	'The peaks of Mt. CodeMore are carpeted with an impenetrable armour of snow.'
	"""Below that snow lies sparkly logic."""

	#
	#-##
	##-#.
	@print ###
	@ ( ##-###.
	lambda ###=# ##
	a ## #=