Strange graphical issue

This happens sometimes on my CE5 MIPS system. System icons will become totally corrupted and strange, like in this image:

What could this be? It's not the VNC, it happens when I locally run it just as much

In a lot of cases, minimizing the affected window and re-maximizing fixes it, though in other cases that just leads to all icons being totally black/dark grey, but while still mostly retaining the original shape of the correct icon

Edited by I dunk for bananas 2023-04-10 7:01 PM








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It's called a glitch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch

Edited by stingraze 2023-04-10 10:13 PM

That's a new one on me. I've had the icons go solid black on more than one device, and I've even had the icons shift down one entry in list view so that each file has the icon of the file right above it on the list. A soft reset always corrects the problem.

Does it occur when it's connected to the internet?

If so, it might be some sort of an attack through the internet... Not sure though.

Update: I see the LAN connected, so it might be something through the network.

I remember experiencing just one time to a similar situation on my Sigmarion 3. But a soft reset did the trick. Maybe it's a good idea to stay offline using Windows CE though.

Some vulnerabilities on Windows 5 / 6.
https://vigilance.fr/vulnerability/Windows-CE-5-6-several-vulnerabilities-6900

Edited by stingraze 2023-04-11 1:41 PM

I don't think it's that, it happens offline just as much. The CE device isn't reachable through the internet just like that, and I don't think there's much of a reason for why someone would want to attack me to make my explorer icons wonky

I'm more worried it could be a hardware thing

No, it isn't hardware. The display driver has borked the icon cache and/or the back buffer. Something is running that crashed or overflowed video RAM I would imagine. VNC is the most obvious candidate to investigate as it manipulate the graphics subsystem.

GDI will be drawing icons off screen to the left, if you could screenshot the entirety of video memory you could see them. They corrupt and until they are reloaded from disk, they won't be redrawn.

True, but automated attacks are most attacks...



Also, just a thought, how much memory space does the machine you are using have left to run programs? Maybe it's a good idea to increase the available RAM if you can do that in the settings.

I don't think there's anyone running an automated attack campaign with the purpose of making the icons of MIPS CE devices wonky plus it also happens offline

It's not the RAM usage, and it also happens with nothing open but the file explorer

I'd have to investigate to see if it also happens without anything at all open, just with the desktop active

Edited by I dunk for bananas 2023-04-12 5:35 PM

Thank you, that explanation makes a lot of sense, though I'm pretty sure it's not a third party application doing this, but I'm double checking right now

It's so strange how it will still retain the vague shape of the icon, but have the colors be totally off. I don't get why it does that. But yeah, it is likely the display driver. This device was rapidly developed within 6 months and since it's a TV receiver, CE is normally never visible and the entire display is drawn by two separate signal processors. So it's likely that the company that developed the device just didn't prioritize fixing something that the end user would never see anyway

Edited by I dunk for bananas 2023-04-12 5:50 PM

It's the loading of the alpha channel info that is getting corrupted, hence the tracing of he outline of the icon. If it isn't an app, then a corrupted attempt to redraw the alpha channel is a distinct possibility. Short of patching Windows CE using platform builder and finding updated versions of DDI. There's probably nothing that can be realistically done.

I have no idea how I would even attempt to fix such an issue, but I've been able to replace system files in a CE image by just patching the image's registry to point to a system file on a piece of storage that I have access to, that way I was able to replace gwes.exe

Yeah it might be a good idea, the cause may be having several applications open... not sure but.



Edited by stingraze 2023-04-13 12:50 AM