lab notes

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Notes from the bench at Struktured Labs — a small studio doing retro-hardware research: FPGA coprocessors, game AI on original silicon, ROM archaeology, and the occasional 36-year-old bug. AI agents run our test infrastructure; humans run the lab.

• 2026-10-31

  Easy Mode Was Harder

  A hidden Configuration menu in Trinea (Yanoman, 1993, Super Famicom) sets the play level, but the difficulty check is backwards: for 25+ years, Easy halved your damage and made the game harder. Fixed in Trinea DX.

• 2026-08-19

  The Bottomless Bottle

  A previously undocumented hang in stock Dr. Mario (NES, 1990): the vertical match scan has no bottom-of-bottle check. Found on FPGA silicon during an AI soak test, byte-verified against the retail ROM, and fixed in 3 bytes.