Silent (CookiePLMonster)
cookieplmonster.github.io · Personal blog · on HN since 2018
Silent, a game modder who writes SilentPatch, explains bugs in old PC games and how they break on modern Windows and hardware.
What HN saysCommenters call his write-up on how Windows 11 24H2 broke GTA San Andreas excellent, and cite it as an example of a long-hidden bug.
27HN people shared it
10linked it in comments
20stories submitted
2.5Kstory points
10 months agolast shared
2018people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H26 people · 1.4K points · first shared 2025 · 298 comments on HN
- 2Year 2038 problem is still alive and well3 people · 241 points · first shared 2022 · 108 comments on HN
- 3High resolution timers and high uptime headaches3 people · 95 points · first shared 2018 · 38 comments on HN
- 4About Cyberpunk 2077 and AMD CPUs2 people · 3 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 5Fixing Mass Effect black blobs on modern AMD CPUs1 people · 562 points · first shared 2020 · 178 comments on HN
- 6Restoring the Gold Filter in Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Director’s Cut1 people · 140 points · first shared 2020 · 59 comments on HN
- 7A technical dive into the new Tokyo Xtreme Racer1 people · 33 points · first shared 2025 · 10 comments on HN
- 8Remastering Colin McRae Rally 3 with SilentPatch1 people · 19 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
- 9Clever bug exploitation – backface culling1 people · 4 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 10Emulator Bug? No, LLVM Bug1 people · 3 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 11Dreamcast Restoration 2.0 and SilentPatch for Crazy Taxi (PC game mod release)1 people · 2 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 12Crashing DInput8 DLL with two lines of code1 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 13Fan research vs. official fix – Yakuza 0 lighting1 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 1410th anniversary of SilentPatch!1 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 15Coding a Single Instance Application the wrong way1 people · 1 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
nix0n · 2025-12-19
There are QOL mods[0] available for that version to get the camera (and controller in general, and other stuff) working better.
Can't speak to the Deck HW or Steam OS specifically, but the SilentPatch and GInput mods have been working great for me on Proton under Linux Mint.
[0]https://cookieplmonster.github.io/mods/gta-vc/
oceansky · 2025-12-11
The write up of how Windows 11 24H2 broke GTA San Andreas was excellent.
https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2025/04/23/gta-san-andreas-win11-24h…
ntoskrnl_exe · 2025-12-30
Pretty much all the Renderware based GTAs have issues these days that only community made patches can mitigate.
A recent example is that in San Andreas, the seaplane never spawns if you're running Windows 11 24H2 or newer. All of it due to a bug that's always been in the game, but only the recent changes in Windows caused it to show up. If anybody's interested, you can read the investigation on it here: https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2025/04/23/gta-san-andreas-win11-24h…
charleslmunger · 2025-11-29
>Not at all? Most memory-safety issues will never even show up in the radar
Citation needed? There's all sorts of problems that don't "show up" but are bad. Obvious historical examples would be heartbleed and cloudbleed, or this ancient GTA bug [1].
1: https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2025/04/23/gta-san-andreas-win11-24h…
perching_aix · 2025-07-18
What is this site?
This is the actual site from the actual modder: https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2018/07/07/farcry-d3d9-bug/
This looks like a copycat site? What for?
canucker2016 · 2025-05-13
So fixing approx. 5-10% of CVEs (by zero-initializing all stack vars) is a worse cure than letting these uninitialized stack vars be possible sources of exploits?
see https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2020/05/solving-uninitialized-stack-me…
Initializing the stack var to zero would have helped mitigate the recently discovered problem in GTA San Andreas (the real problem is an unvalidated data file) - see https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2025/04/23/gta-san-andreas-win11-24h…
lalalandland · 2023-01-15
You can read more about it here:
https://cookieplmonster.github.io/about/
breakingcups · 2021-10-20
It's also a common thing that Silent (aka CookiePLMonster) fixes in the games he patches.
See for example:
- https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2020/05/23/silentpatch-mafia-ii-defi…
- https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2021/02/27/silentpatch-yakuza-remast…
cwizou · 2021-08-12
A few years back, Intel was striking marketing deals with large game developers that included them giving away free copies of their compiler and support. It's unclear how prevalent that was, though there were a few titles with an Intel splash logo that were part of this.
This is often assumed to be the cause of the difference of performances between AMD and Intel CPUs in games btw, and while that can definitely come into it, it's not always correct. Sometimes the engines just don't know about the CPUs and treat them like the previous generation (like at Ryzen launch where some games ignored SMT on those), sometimes the devs only tested on one arch, or sometimes it's some extra library that makes incorrect assumptions.
Interesting read on the topic with Cyberpunk : https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2020/12/13/cyberpunk-2077-and-amd-cp…
rafaelmn · 2025-05-05
Frankly this kind of stuff getting upvoted kind of makes HN less and less valuable as a news source - this is yet another "hey I trivially exposed something to the LLM and I got some funny results on a toy example".
These kind of demos were cool 2 years ago - then we got function calling in the API, it became super easy to build this stuff - and the reality hit that LLMs were kind of shit and unreliable at using even the most basic tools. Like oh woow you can get a toy example working on it and suddenly it's a "natural language interface to WinDBG".
I am excited about progress in this front in any domain - but FFS show actual progress or something interesting. Show me an article like this [1] where the LLM did anything useful. Or just show what you did that's not "oh I built a wrapper on a CLI" - did you fine tune the model to get better performance ? Did you compare which model performs better by setting up some benchmark and found one to be impressive ?
I am not shitting on OP here because it's fine to share what you're doing and get excited about it - maybe this is step one, but why the f** is this a front page article ?
[1]https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2025/04/23/gta-san-andreas-win11-24h…