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Chankast Utilities v0.01 released

Maagic

Cherry Finish!
I've been researching this program, "speed pig", because imo, there is no such thing as a program that can make your pc run faster, and the explanation of how it works on the home page makes no sense at all. It has been confirmed that this program does modify your FSB (front side bus) speed, overclocking your pc.This will only work on PCs that support FSB changes in the bios, and wont work on motherboards where it is changed with jumpers. It does other things as well, but i'm still not sure what exactly, as i'm still experimenting. It seems many people are using this, as i find it on alot of boards, and I fear for the safety of their PCs. A program that overclocks your pc on the fly is not necessarily safe to use. I've emailed this "Kryso Fun" for some more answers. I'm sure others have too.
 

Greggory

New member
I've posted this a couple of times about SpeedPig from the official Chankast Utilities site..

Some information about Speed Pig, what it does is that it decreases the refresh time, it doesn't exactly improve the speed of your pc though. Each program has a delay time, not the same as frame skip, between each frame. What he does is, he improves the time up time. This makes the game substantially faster while being emulated as you can see the remarkable speed of the FPS in our screenshots section.

I have talked to Kryso a couple of times and I did ask him this question. Since he himself has been using the emulator without any problems and Speed Pig with it. If he made it to harm anyone's computer, then why would he use it on his and take screenshots of it? It doesn't make any sense. He has a limit to the fast and slow bar.. it's not like a button you press can go as fast or slow as you want. I will thought await his response once again on this because I honestly don't think it'll hurt your computer. I read some other posts in their chankast utilities forum and people said it's just like the, "Nvidia tools or Clockgen allowing you to change fbs, agp and pci values from windows". :)
 

Maagic

Cherry Finish!
Why is it that people are so deathly afraid of viruses, but perfectly willing to run a program that modifies system settings, and has as much or more potential to harm their system?

I'll give you an example:
Back in 1999 the first program ever written to modify a system's FSB settings called SoftFSB, was written by H.Oda. There was a warning on his page that the software was only for advanced users familiar with the concept of phase locked loops. You had to download a seperate PLL file with specific information on your motherboard to use the program. A year later, H. Oda was forced to remove the program from his website because people were ruining their computers with it. Why? Not because he had written a malicious program, but because users were downloading the wrong PLL files and other silly crap.

Nvidia tools, (which, btw is made by Nvidia) is a very sophisticated piece of software that is capable of altering settings such as FSB and AGP timing, based on detecting specific hardware properties. (did i mention its made by NVIDIA?)

Clockgen uses the patented Panopsys hardware detection system to get the information required to safely overclock your FSB and others in real time. It also has seperate versions for different motherboards. Panopsys Ltd. is an estalblished software firm with many patents and technologies.

Yes, I have read the front page of the chankast utilities home page, it does not make any sense unless it is simply a mis-translation:
-"what it does is that it decreases the refresh time" The refresh time of what?
-"it doesn't exactly improve the speed of your pc though" But it DOES!
-"Each program has a delay time, not the same as frame skip, between each frame." I have never written anything like this into a program of mine, it would slow it down, why would the Chankast developers?
-"What he does is, he improves the time up time." There is no such thing as the tooth fairy.

I have already disassembled "speedpig.dll" (next time try something more secure than UPX), and I can safely say that it does not interface with chankast_alpha.exe at any point. In fact the only modification to chankast_alpha.exe made in the installation of Chankast Utilities is to a program resource that controls the menu. This would lead me to believe that the program has alot in common with Nvidia tools and clockgen in that they are all FSB overclockers, not Chankast hacks. In this case I would recommend Nvidia tools and clockgen because they are both reputable programs, that are proven safe. If this program is a FSB overclocker, why didn't Kryso advertise it as so?

I'm not going to mention what the dangers of realtime FSB overclocking are, as i already have on the forum at the Chankast Utilities page:
Forum Post

Also, please stop believing what unknown software developers claim about their software! The program may be perfectly safe on his computer, and he may not know that it may be potentially harmful to people with a motherboard different than his own. Or he might, and is simply pushing for popularity and notoriety.

I have added breakpoints to speedpig.dll, and I'm working with a realtime debugger at the moment to try and find out what the slider exactly does. Hopefully soon i will have more info.
 

posty_2k3

T3h pwn3r3r
Hmmm, thanks for the info Maagic. Didnt work for me anyways. It sped the rest of the pc up, but chanka slowed down. Go fig, eh?
 

minkster

New member
posty_2k3 said:
Hmmm, thanks for the info Maagic. Didnt work for me anyways. It sped the rest of the pc up, but chanka slowed down. Go fig, eh?

the same thing happend to me and when i tried it i was quite impressed yet scared at the same time that my monitor was gona explode :p i guess if my pc normally runs at 2.8ghz and then using speed pig it really feels like the computer is majorly over clocked. is this program dangerous?
 

N7U8Team

New member
Maagic said:
Why is it that people are so deathly afraid of viruses, but perfectly willing to run a program that modifies system settings, and has as much or more potential to harm their system?

I'll give you an example:
Back in 1999 the first program ever written to modify a system's FSB settings called SoftFSB, was written by H.Oda. There was a warning on his page that the software was only for advanced users familiar with the concept of phase locked loops. You had to download a seperate PLL file with specific information on your motherboard to use the program. A year later, H. Oda was forced to remove the program from his website because people were ruining their computers with it. Why? Not because he had written a malicious program, but because users were downloading the wrong PLL files and other silly crap.

Nvidia tools, (which, btw is made by Nvidia) is a very sophisticated piece of software that is capable of altering settings such as FSB and AGP timing, based on detecting specific hardware properties. (did i mention its made by NVIDIA?)

Clockgen uses the patented Panopsys hardware detection system to get the information required to safely overclock your FSB and others in real time. It also has seperate versions for different motherboards. Panopsys Ltd. is an estalblished software firm with many patents and technologies.

Yes, I have read the front page of the chankast utilities home page, it does not make any sense unless it is simply a mis-translation:
-"what it does is that it decreases the refresh time" The refresh time of what?
-"it doesn't exactly improve the speed of your pc though" But it DOES!
-"Each program has a delay time, not the same as frame skip, between each frame." I have never written anything like this into a program of mine, it would slow it down, why would the Chankast developers?
-"What he does is, he improves the time up time." There is no such thing as the tooth fairy.

I have already disassembled "speedpig.dll" (next time try something more secure than UPX), and I can safely say that it does not interface with chankast_alpha.exe at any point. In fact the only modification to chankast_alpha.exe made in the installation of Chankast Utilities is to a program resource that controls the menu. This would lead me to believe that the program has alot in common with Nvidia tools and clockgen in that they are all FSB overclockers, not Chankast hacks. In this case I would recommend Nvidia tools and clockgen because they are both reputable programs, that are proven safe. If this program is a FSB overclocker, why didn't Kryso advertise it as so?

I'm not going to mention what the dangers of realtime FSB overclocking are, as i already have on the forum at the Chankast Utilities page:
Forum Post

Also, please stop believing what unknown software developers claim about their software! The program may be perfectly safe on his computer, and he may not know that it may be potentially harmful to people with a motherboard different than his own. Or he might, and is simply pushing for popularity and notoriety.

I have added breakpoints to speedpig.dll, and I'm working with a realtime debugger at the moment to try and find out what the slider exactly does. Hopefully soon i will have more info.


I don't know how much you know with programming. As you say "I have never written anything like this into a program of mine, it would slow it down, why would the Chankast developers?" But do you know the win32 program are all basic on a message system, even if you don't write any delay in it, the system should do it automatic, or why windows should perform multi task if your program could spend all CPU times?

And, you chould dissamble speedpig.dll, why don't you dissamble softfsb too? You should see what different between this 2 programs. As you say softfsb have to use a PPL table, and NVIDIA's tool could work only on hisown video card, but why do my program does not has these limits?
 

Maagic

Cherry Finish!
Let's just get one thing clear: I am not a programmer, not professionally, or as a hobby. I've taken 4 years of college level computer science, and programming was an interest of mine at the time. I do however still have the knowledge necessary to understand a program, based on its effects, layout and code.

I don't know a whole lot about the messaging system of windows beyond its implementation when coding, but it seems as it would not apply, given that Chankast uses Directx9 to render individual frames. I would say the multitasking ability of Directx is controlled in the respective libraries. I may be wrong, but it is of no consequence to this issue.

I did disassemble SoftFSB, 4 years ago. Your program looks nothing like it, and that scares me even more. Soft FSB required specific PLL files to determine what FSB frequencies were safe, it did not require them for operation. That is why so many people had bad experiences with it.

Nvidia tools does not just work on the video card, it has settings for modifying all aspects of your system bus. It is easy for a program to change the FSB from windows, but it would require specific information to know what frequencies will not cause undesired effects.

If you keep comparing it to other FSB overclocking software, and saying doesn't have the limitations of other FSB overclocking software, then I can only believe that it is exactly that: FSB overclocking software, yet I find no indication of this in the program, the documentation, or your website. Instead, a bogus explanation on its workings. Also, if this is the case, then it cannot be classified as a Chankast hack, which it currently seems to be.

My point is: Modifying your system bus speed is very serious business, a professionally written and fully tested solution such as Nvidia tools or clockgen is definately needed. Modifying system settings of any sort is not a good idea with a program you know nothing about.

Please put this to rest in my mind and just give a reasonable explanation on how it really works. I dont think thats too much to ask.
 

achiles

New member
DO NOT RUN THE SPEEDPIG PROGRAM IF YOU OVERCLOCK, I found this myself the hard way.

My computer ran crazy taxi 2 on chankast perferctly, overclocked at 3.2 from 2.8, When I ran speedpig It started crashing non-stop when I ran chakast , tried system restore and no help, checked my voltage no help either, went to my registry and, BINGO found some entries from spig, surprised, not, mad yes :term: . Got rid of the crap and now is running perfectly, full frame like it was before. phew thank god. :bouncy:
 

Dural

New member
The point fo me is: Why the author simply says that SP is actually overclocking your PC and therefore must be used with the needed care? I think that no one with a brain would at that point accuse you of something. I've written an utilities that (seems) to work but that is sorta risky to use, that's fine, as long as I as a user know it and can decide on my own to run it or not.

Having discovered that I've actually oc'ed my PC "on the fly" without being aware of it didn't make me particulartly happy... :plain:
 

N7U8Team

New member
I could say only a thing, my program is nothing about FSB, and actully I don't know how to modify FSB speed, I just modified the 8253 controller, you should search what does the 8253 do for your computer.
 

mezkal

Man on a mission
So after reading up on what the 8253/54 controllers do I would have to say that SPEEDPIG is one dangerous little tool. The URL I got my info from was http://www.techedge.com.au/tech/8253tec.htm

After doing some more reading I am of the opinion that SPEEDPIG does nothing more than cause the RAM refresh rate to be either increased or possibly ignored at certain intervals (By possibly inserting set values from a look up table associated with the slider? Theorising only here) In any case its NASTY
It's a KLUDGE of the worst kind. In a modern NT based OS such as XP the timing of devices is IMPERATIVE to the STABILITY of the machine.

You see N7U8, MS coded NT based OSes around the HAL Infrastructure. This Hardware Abstraction Layer specifies how certain CPU and CHIPSET combos should work : How they should pass data to eachother and other devices and at what ranges of tick rate they will need for optimum stability. Speedpig works at lower level than XP would like it too. VERY NASTY. All NT based OSes use Protected Memory and Paging to control access to devices. No device (aside from simple MBM5 driver hacks FOR REPORTING ONLY and the like) should be accessed directlty within an NT based OS. Certainly not something as fundamental as the RAM REFRESH TIMING CIRCUIT for god's sake!!!

Bad Bad Bad :(

Nuff Said

Mezkal
 

machspeed

Dead Guy
i would have to agree that speedpig is dangerous...i dont know when it comes to programming, but i know my computer: i built it myself...i ran Speed Pig and I got screwed majorly. It sped up the rest of my system and it ran the windows clock way over by an hour or so...and all animations were sped up: like XBOX's avatar...i got worried so i restarted my computer, and all seems fine...except i cant sign in to MSN messenger for some reason now whether Speed Pig had something to do with it, i dont know....BE CAREFUL WITH THIS PROGRAM
 

peperami

New member
i dont mind waiting one bit for chanka to support cheat/rumble support but being inquisitive grabbed the utils, boy thank god for this thread.. welcome to the recycle bin Chankast Utilities!

@N7U8Team
No real description or documentation, im laughing at you all.. kids with to much time on there hands eh, no wonder theres no official support.plz go back to beating off as quickly as you arrived, your "help" for the community
is having quite the opposite effect.
 

Greggory

New member
You guys are all very mean. Everything else works fine, the cheats system, snapshot maker, region select, and others too. Not only that, you guys have no respect for any programmer out there. At least give him some appreciation for the Cheats system and maybe another feature he added.

First you guys said it is a FAKE, which it was NOT.
Then you guys rumble about Speed Pig and you don't even realize that..
A) He's from another country (GMT+8, look that up too!) and he is asleep right now.
B) It is hard for him to speak English and translate from Chinese.
C) You don't even give him a chance to say his full thoughts.

All you guys do is say... "Ohh BEWARE Chankast Utilities".. I monitor every program that is running in my computer. Anything that would effect MSN Messenger, it surely is not Chankast Utilities. I would be the first to know. Some of you guys are too paranoid and some of you guys just want to always jump to a conclusion.

Just wait for a response from him..and stop bringing Chankast Utilities down. Quite frankly it just makes you look like all a bunch of greedy people (I am sorry if I offend you, but that is the truth). You guys wanted speed, he found a way, give him the chance to fully explain it, you know we all have lives. You should be thankful that he is offering any support at all, I have barely seen the Official Chanka Team helping or responding that much to posts in this forum for support.
 
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Maagic

Cherry Finish!
Thank you very much Kryso, I appreciate you coming forward with the way speed pig actually works. The 8253? Hmm.. that brought back a lot of nostalgic memories when i read it, so, I dug up a couple of my old references and hacker diskettes (which seemed to be more pertinent), and did a little reading. The 8253 is a PIT (Programmable Interrupt Timer). In early pc's it was a seperate chip, but in today's pc's, it is integrated into the chipset. It is used by the system to indicate when the clock is updated, when the RAM is refreshed and it controls the PC speaker (yes the beeping one). This PIT is used by applications as a reference timer, for programs that require such a thing. It's been made obsolete by the 8254 but thats irrelevant.

In the days of dos, the hacking (changing the frequencies) of this PIT was a known technique to speed up or slown the rate at which a particular part of a program was run. It had some side effects which i will mention. The (8253) pit has 3 seperate timers, whose functions i mentioned above. A program can use any one of these timers as a reference. The timer that was hacked most in the day was channel 0- for the clock. There are ways to get around the clock speeding up thing, as it is really only a side effect of the process. The program would modify the frequency of this PIT to take advantage of its new speed, and then change it back when it was done. The other 2 channels were never hacked because the results were more often than not undesireable.

This, of course was back in the days when systems were relatively simple, and people only had one program running at a time. The truth is, this is a very old hack that has had its corpse re-animated in a rather unsavory way. There is a reason this hack has not been used in a very long time. As mezkal said, PC's and operating systems have become infinitely more complex in recent years, and are now extremely dependant on accurate timing. This hardware hack also does supersede the hardware abstraction layer, and therefore classifies as potentially dangerous in my book, regardless of what it does. This hack was not considered entirely safe years ago when it was created, it safety now i would believe to be proportionate to the the complexity of the pc in question.

This program does not only modify channel 0 of the 8253/54. It also modifes the channel that controls the signal sent to the DMA (Dynamic Memory Architecture) that is in charge of "refreshing" your ram, or applying an electrical charge to it so that it keeps the information stored in it. A side effect of this can be improvement in performance, or it can be a decrease in performance. In fact all the results i can find pertaining to this say that changing the frequency of channel 1 on the 8253 can yield unpredictable results given a wide variety of hardware configurations. This would explain the wide range of effects we have seen.

The program also modifies a timer that is exclusive to the 8254, which determines how often ps/2 devices' buffers are polled. This would explain the keyboard repeating.

I noted on my test (an old p3 700) system the following results while using speed pig, turned up to the maximum value that had an effect, with no game running in chankast: An marked increase in processor temperature, northbridge temperature, and ram temperature via an external probe. The ram came close to overheating at 45 degrees centigrade. I also noted that the front side bus slowly increased to 106 from 100. I cannot say why this occured, possibly electromagnetic interference due to the increase in frequency and energy associated with refreshing the ram at a higher rate. In any case this, and several other side effects mentioned all have something in common. They are all unwanted and potentially dangerous.

Now i see why PortTalk was used, a serial mode connection to the 8253 had to be estabished to bypass protected mode lockouts for restricted i/o ports, in order to change the values of this timing ic's registers. I'm not positive, but i dont think that is what porttalk was intended for, but you can decide that for yourself.

My original point still stands. The 8253/54 is a critical part of your system's timing functions, just like the crystal and the clock generator. To re-iterate, this program bypasses security functions of your processor in order to change system properties.

If you dont want to listen to me, then listen to Kryso, he says this program modifies the 8253 controller, which is a "chip" in that is inside your system. This program modifies system settings, This program does not indicate that it will change system settings anywhere in its documentation. This program was distributed as a "hack" for chankast, when in actuality, it has nothing to do with chankast at all.

All i am asking is that this program be distributed with a warning to users that it will change important system settings, and has the potential to cause undesired effects.

Edit: The only link I could find dealing with PIT hacking on the web. Its obviously very old, given the tech specs cited in the article.
 
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Greggory

New member
Maagic said:
All i am asking is that this program be distributed with a warning to users that it will change important system settings, and has the potential to cause undesired effects.

I am sure he will do that if what you state is correct. He should post his comments about this soon. After all this is only the first release, give him a chance, he still needs to add support for the capcom_hack and new_gfx. He had a hard enough time in the beginning when again you guys initialy proposed his entire project as a fake. :yawn:
 

mezkal

Man on a mission
Greggory said:
I am sure he will do that if what you state is correct. He should post his comments about this soon. After all this is only the first release, give him a chance, he still needs to add support for the capcom_hack and new_gfx. He had a hard enough time in the beginning when again you guys initialy proposed his entire project as a fake. :yawn:


I never proposed any part of the Chankast Utils to be fake at all. I only criticised the Speedpig dll. You might want to read my post again. I love the region selector (saves time and lets me avoid Hexedit :p) and the integrated VMS browser. Speedpig, however, is bad news. and as such should be removed unless the author would like to have some hand in ppl losing data.

Peace

mezkal
 
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MasterPhW

Master of the Emulation Flame
I've talked with them and they are some nice ppl, who only have the target to make Chankast better... nothing more.
Some things they are working for the futur:
*work on all versions (allready done... release in near future)
* run bios (for ppl who don't know that you have to change your drive selector to an empty one)
* disable sound (to speed up the emulation)
* change the priority ( it's a well know fact that Chankast runs better if you set the priority to high, now you will can do it in the emu)
and probably some more.
If you don't like these tools, then don't use them, but don't be so rude to this team!
 

OzTm

New member
The only problem is that they don't say "Using this tool MAY BE HARMFUL TO YOUR COMPUTER! Use with caution!". That's all.
 

Keith

The Show Must Go On!
Administrator
I think the majority of the post regarding the speedpig issue were very informative and should be something everyone should read before using it. Also keep in mind this is still not officially approved by the Chankast development team .. so please use at your own risk.

From what I have been told the other tools beside speedpig work great and have some nice features.
 

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