Luckily, he was able to come up with a workaround.
Here's a soul-crushing situation that doesn't have a workaround, as far as I can tell.
You can play the original Deus Ex on OnLive. By default, it sets the fov to a very low number. It's only possible to change it in the console (there is no UI for it). But the console is disabled. However, you can get around that by pressing T, which creates a mini console with "say " prepoulated. Press delete to erase say, and type "fov 90". So close...
But they disabled the Enter key from working.
So you can get full access to the console, type the command that would fix the FOV, but you're unable to execute it because Enter key does not get sent to the game. You're completely helpless.
OnLive runs on OSX. gdb (i think) also runs on OSX. It should be possible to isolate the callback used to handle keyboard input and call it with c=10. This would take anywhere from hours to weeks of debugging though.
No, that won't work. Nothing you do client-side will help.
OnLive Client <-all input is transmitted-> OnLive Servers <-filter out Enter-> Deus Ex instance in a VM.
The enter key is filtered out on their servers. Unless you hack into their servers and change that, there is nothing you can do on the client-side. That's what makes you completely helpless.
Ah, my apologies, I thought the game was running locally. (This sort of assholeness on the part of servers is basically why 'cloud computing' is such a bad idea.)
I disagree that cloud computing is a bad idea because of this. It has advantages and disadvantages. Not being able to hack around to make changes you wish is a disadvantage, but having access to something you would not have otherwise is a much bigger advantage.
Here's a soul-crushing situation that doesn't have a workaround, as far as I can tell.
You can play the original Deus Ex on OnLive. By default, it sets the fov to a very low number. It's only possible to change it in the console (there is no UI for it). But the console is disabled. However, you can get around that by pressing T, which creates a mini console with "say " prepoulated. Press delete to erase say, and type "fov 90". So close...
But they disabled the Enter key from working.
So you can get full access to the console, type the command that would fix the FOV, but you're unable to execute it because Enter key does not get sent to the game. You're completely helpless.