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1. Embed this notice
   Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:34 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

   here's the 0A ("farm") tile: it turns out it's a mix of farms, ranches, and grain elevators.

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:20 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     god help me I don't want to have to write an extension to link ghidra and dosbox but that might be easier on my brain than figuring out this whole compression algorithm without being able to see all the RAM at once

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:21 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     who wants to play Railroad Tycoon on Memory Uninitialized World?

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:21 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     fun fact: because the saved game map files are the same format as PIC, you can swap them around. Want to build a railroad on Lenin's face? YOU CAN!

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:22 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     yeah I'm randomly corrupting it, and this isn't any RLE. This is definitely some kind of LZ*-style compression

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:23 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     so what the heck

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:23 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     well I interestingly corrupted it

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:24 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     NOPE! I decoded (using my load-it-as-a-logo trick) the all-1 and all-2 tiles and got this. They're fully one color.

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:25 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay so a map of all the same tile results in an 83 byte file, which only varies in one byte (0x7) which is the specified byte that it's full of.

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:25 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     now the reason it's not smaller is that a map actually looks like this:

     It's a 320x200 pixel image, with only the top-left 256x192 actually used for the map. Most of those 83 bytes are probably encoding the rest of this area

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:26 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     and done.

     I was so busy trying to use my HACKER SKILLS to realize I didn't need to

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:27 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     well my code was supposed to generate a world that's entirely water, but I got the 05 or 08 world. strange.

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:27 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     oh I'm a doofus.

     I was trying to hack the game to save a game where every tile is 01, so that it would be "pure" and not mixed 01 tiles and 01-spans.

     but I have already made the mixed map: I can just load it, and SAVE IT BACK OUT

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:28 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     MOV AL, 01
     MOV DI, [BP-6]
     MOV CX, 320
     REP STOSB

     that's 10 bytes.

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:29 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     so I need to write 256 bytes into RAM, without a pointer to it, in... 5 bytes.

     oh boy

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:29 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay maybe I can take out a function call
     that gives me like, 45 bytes. more than enough

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:30 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     it's possible the intermediate RLE is making this weirder than it should be. I should try hacking the map to be fully one type PRIOR to the intermediate RLE step

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:31 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     judging by how this works

     I think it might be writing data files in 47-bit chunks?

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:31 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     so, a datapoint:
     a map entirely full of 01 and a map entirely full of 02 are different by 4 bytes, scattered around the 5k file.

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:32 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay checked the rest (except rivers, because... no)

     so 05 and 08 are mines, 0a is farms/ranches/grain elevators, 0c is village/industries, 0e is cities and industries, and the rest (at least in 16 and under) are single-types.

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:33 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     villages are also paper mills, stock yards, factories, and food proc.

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2023 04:37:34 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     0b (foothills) are not special. set it to all 0b, and you really get all 0b

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:03:53 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     anyway this is where I'm leaving it for now:

     stations are all rendered as Depots and the special industries/landings are all being located wrong. But that's a lot of progress!

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:04:43 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     they store the type of the station outside of the tracks list, which is weird. annoying.

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:05:19 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     gah.

     There's 4 types of stations: and three types of stations in the tiles.

     these fuckers generate one of the 4 variants at runtime

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:05:37 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     yeah it seems to basically draw the regular track, but it offsets it tangent to the track direction.

     2 pixels in each direction

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:05:47 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     yeah I can't fully decode this (TOO PLANAR) but I'm pretty sure there's no doubled tiles here. it generates them when it draws the double-tracks

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:05:57 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I thought I might could cheat and just pull the generated tiles from RAM but I forgot, this is EGA: it's PLANAR

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:06:05 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     oh god

     you can have double tracks, right?
     but where are the tiles for the double tracks stored?

     answer: NOWHERE! they get generated at runtime!

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:06:14 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     completely normal train layout

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:06:21 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     found another bug:

     the game doesn't use the same bridge logic for AI players as the human player. This means that they can make really really long bridges

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:06:26 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     gah this is weird.
     the tracks tilesheet is 20x20, right?
     but the rest of the tiles are 16x16.

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:06:30 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     anyway I have touched that shit yet, but I finished up the ocean stuff:

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:06:36 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     meaning my individual per-tile work isn't helping. fuck.

     I'm gonna need to either do a LOT of testing with variations... or find the code. Either are going to be hard

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:06:40 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     but I don't think this is actually how the game works. I think it's more like there's a single running accumulator which affects ALL types of special tiles.

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:06:43 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     so I think I've fundamentally misunderstood how this works.

     my theory was that a given tile would default to a standard thing, but then it would pick a secondary thing depending on where it is on the map. Things like "every 6th tile can be a coal mine".

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:06:48 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay I think I've found a problem.
     I can generate single-tile maps and they work exactly the same in my renderer

     but then I render a real map and a bunch of things are misaligned

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:06:52 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay I have a HALF RIVER WORLD, which does load properly.

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:06:56 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     hmm. I can't load up the riverworld (damn you Philip José Farmer!) because it hangs the game

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:00 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     uh oh. there's some incorrectly placed blocks

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:03 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     wow. the river layout code worked first try! I'm a better programmer than I thought.

     The "landing"s aren't working yet though, because I don't know how they work. Some rivers are picked to be Landings instead of Rivers. Why? no idea

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:05 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I of course mean these 4 stray pixels.

     whatta heck

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:07 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     this is terrible. did you even pay attention to what you were making, Sidney?

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:10 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay I gave up and just stuck the list of known positions into the script.

     Here it is with 0xA (Farms/Grain/Ranch) added

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:11 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     (0, 118), (1, 137), (2, 156), (3, 175), (8, 14), (9, 33), (10, 52), (11, 71), (12, 90), (13, 109), (14, 128), (15, 147), (16, 166), (17, 185), (21, 5), (22, 24),

     what kind of pattern even is this

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:13 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay. regenerated.
     197 grains, 196 livestock.

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:14 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I ran it again... and it didn't work. FUCK

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:15 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     ARGH this process already takes 15 minutes to run and now I need to fix it by slowing it down more

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:16 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     yeah look.

     two cursors. that's not right.

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:17 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     FUCK

     my recognition is right.

     my screenshots were NOT.

     I think my program was taking screenshots while the game was still redrawing the screen, and so it got partial map updates

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:18 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     FUCK something in my recognition is wrong. Those numbers are not correct

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:19 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay I have now similar-image recognized my 1324 screenshots.
     There are apparently 347 positions where grain mills can spawn, and 353 locations where livestock farms can spawn.

     now here's the real question: do I figure out the pattern? or do I just stuff that list into my script?

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:23 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I have taken 1,324 screenshots. that should help.

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:24 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     You ever stay up until 5:30 am and you're really really tired but you also kinda want to write some image-recognition code to extract Railroad Tycoon maps from the game?

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:25 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     anyway here's my partial rendering of a full Railroad Tycoon map. All unhandled tiles (4, 9, A, C, D) are in black.

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:26 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     ugh. I'm gonna have to write some hacky code to explore the map and figure out what tiles are at what locations. that's gonna be a pain.

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:27 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     so I figured out the patterns of the tile types 5 and 8 (they're identical!) and E (it repeats vertically every 32 vertical tiles and pretends the map is 205 tiles tall) but tile 0xA is kicking my ass.

     it's... weird. like I think it might be repeating every... 224 tiles? or 219, depending on how tall it thinks the map is?

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:28 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     also, my trans agenda has apparently sunk the city of Redding, CA.

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:29 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     if you go into the game to see what's what, it turns out the blue is clear land, the pink is ocean, and the white is mountains

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:30 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     There we go. The trans-continental railroad tycoon.

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:31 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I love that it's 2023 and I just did "copy *.* A:" like it's 1981.

     DOS is forever. DOS will never die

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:32 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     and another.
     I even tried on a different disk.
     HOW MANY FLOPPIES ARE GONNA DIE ON MY TODAY?

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:32 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I grabbed another random floppy disk and it turns out it has been formatted with NTFS.

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:33 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     MY FLOPPY DISK HAS DEVELOPED A BAD TRACK ZERO?

     TRANSPHOBIA!

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:34 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     turns out the copyright notice is 63 bytes long

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:35 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I need to figure out where to stuff 60 bytes of VGA manipulation code though, my existing solution is kinda DOSBox-specific

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:36 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     now I just need to write this onto a floppy disk (or two) so I can take it down to my pentium and get a picture on a CRT monitor

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:37 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     but there we go.
     There's my pink. Just needed to use the VGA registers instead of the EGA registers

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:37 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     there we go. Using my patches to pic2png/png2pic and modifying EGRAPHICS.EXE to program the colors differently and a minor fix to the GAME.EXE file to send post-processed colors instead of the default ones...

     BEHOLD: THE Trans(continental) Railroad Tycoon!

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:38 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     THAT WAS THE WRONG INDEX OH GOD

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:39 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     it helps if you don't have your DOSBox set to emulate an EGA card, I'm sure

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:40 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     so one way I could fix this is to stay in mode 0D (320x200x16) but use the VGA palette registers instead of the EGA registers.
     That'd lose the compatibility with EGA, but it's 2023, I don't think I need to worry TOO hard about that.

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:41 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     there's my pink!
     it's just rendering completely incorrectly because I'm in color mode 10 instead of 0D, so I'm seeing WAY more than I should and things are kinda terrible and different.

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:42 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     yeah that's fine

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:43 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     ah-ha! I found a hint:
     EGA apparently only supports color remapping in 350-line mode!

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:45 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     ugh. maybe the mod register has the shift register turned off? that supposedly enables "CGA graphics mode" which might mean 16-colors only.

     unfortunately that's a read-only register

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:47 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     that grey color is color index 07: so it's acting like it's truncating the high-bits.

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:49 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     it's in EGA/VGA video mode 0D: that's 320x200, 16 colors, 8 pages.
     I don't know why it'd be interpreting my colors as weird alternative things

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:53 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     but instead of a pink color for index 1, I'm getting grey. AAAAAA grey.

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:07:56 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I don't get it.
     I'm using the following:
     INP 0x3CA; Clear 3c0 index
     OUTP 0x3C0, 01 ; set 3c0 index to 1
     OUTP 0x3C0, 0x27 ; set palette entry 1 to 0x27: 100111: blue/green/red on, secondary red on. This should result in color FFAAAA: a pink.

     INP 0x3CA
     OUTP 0x3C0, 0x20 ; re-enable video

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:00 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     it's still not working. I think something deeply fucky is happening inside my virtual VGA card that's making it not properly set EGA colors.

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:03 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Turning off the color-shifting logic makes the intro a bit uglier

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:07 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     this translation means the actual colors end up being:
     00 01 02 03 04 00 06 07 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

     I don't know why they didn't want to use that last color slot.

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:10 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     that list, btw, is the following:
     00 01 02 03 04 00 06 07 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E 0F

     COLOR 5 KNOWS WHAT IT FUCKING DID

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:13 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     so the EGA/VGA driver handles colors in a weird way: The main EXE passes a list of 16 colors, and then the driver does this to all of them:

     ((x&0xF)+8)&0x17

     why not JUST CHANGE THE LIST OF COLORS YOU TELL IT TO SET?

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:14 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I'm sure that's fine

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:18 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     ugh. so the palette-setup call is into an external overlay and called from an internal overlay.

     I hate 16bit DOS programming

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:20 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     bah. dosbox doesn't let me set breakpoints on io ports.

     WHY NOT?

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:22 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     as well as put this code online and make a pull request.

     but all that can wait. it's 11pm and I've been working on this project for A WEEK and my brain hurts

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:22 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     time to close every tab and program I have open.
     it's over. I won.
     all that's left is bookkeeping

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:23 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     so I need to do some stuff to modify this to not write PNG files but instead write binary files I can easily parse, and then I need to reverse engineer the algorithm for handling the weird tiles, where what they are depends on their position

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     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:25 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     this thread has been going for a week and I finally got the result I needed and the answer has been sitting in a github repo since 2018!

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:25 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     (okay not really. I had to modify the code, and the modifications were only possible using what I learned over this week)

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:26 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     And it works. We have decoding of Railroad Tycoon MAP files!

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:27 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     well it's not decoding it exactly right, but it's... close?

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:28 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     SID MEIER'S RAILROAD TYCOON VIOLATED THE UNISYS GIF PATENT

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:29 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     it's LZW! the same one that powers GIF

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:30 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     and you know WHY that's a big deal?

     THERE'S TOOLS THAT CAN EXTRACT COVERT ACTION FILES!

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:30 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     https://github.com/jarikomppa/covert_action

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:31 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     made a BIG discovery:

     the labs.PIC file in railroad tycoon is identical to the one in Covert Action, released by Microprose the same year.

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:32 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     and there's again an interesting pattern at 9-bits wide.

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:33 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay it only appears in my super-compressed files. not in the semi-compressed ones or the regular compressed files.

     so it's probably nothing. sadly.

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:33 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay so I've done an interesting experiment: I turned off the RLE.

     So the fully-compressed max-RLE version of the file is 83 bytes.
     Turning off RLE means that the intermediate compression is just 01 for 64,000 times.
     So how big is the output file, given that a standard map is something like 13k?

     it's 423 bytes!

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:34 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I've gotten weirder and I tried dumping a compressed map into a bitmap renderer, and there's a suspicious pattern at 9-bits wide.

     is this a 9-bits-per-element format? why would you do this, sidney?

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:35 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I haven't written an x86 emulator since... oh yeah the last time I tried to reverse engineer a compression algorithm

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:36 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     maybe I just need to write an x86 emulator

     like you do

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:37 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     although it's amusing when you see code like:
     MOV BX, AX
     ADD BX, AX
     ADD BX, AX
     SHL BX, 1
     MOV AX, word ptr[BX+4]

     to read data from AX*6+4.

     like come on, x86. don't you have a way to do a multiplication+addition pointer interdirected read in a single instruction? you're losing your touch!

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:37 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     it probably does but this code is targeting 8086 so it couldn't use it yet

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:38 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     it's physically impossible to stare at x86 code for long without wanting to design a RISC architecture

     because good lord

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:39 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     ahh I've hit another function where ghidra has decided it can no longer rename variables
     that certainly helps me reverse this shit! I have to remember what uVar5 means

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:40 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     this debugger needs a "step backwards" command

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:41 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I do not have a smart brain, I have a clever brain. they are not the same. and this is annoyingly one problem I can't clever may way around

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:42 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     and I have EXACTLY the wrong kind of brain to be any good at that. my brain is optimized for "let's take a different route and avoid the long slog"

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:43 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     compression is the ultimate "you stare at this code until you understand it. good fucking luck"
     and you can't avoid it. you just have to

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:44 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I am a fucking MASTER at finding shortcuts. I have endless tools and tricks and "I know a guy"s and research methods and everything. I can get out of just about any work I supposedly need to do, by doing things in a different way.

     not compression.

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:46 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     that's one of the problems with being a game hacker: you don't use "good" solutions. you might try editing the RAM of your program from an external program. and once you realize you can do that, you realize you can use it everywhere

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:46 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     here's why I hate reversing compression code:

     there's no shortcuts.

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:47 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I think I'm gonna try abusing external memory reading into letting me watch the "dictionary" array through the course of a compression. that might tell me some interesting info

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:48 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     it's kinda telling about how my brain works that I keep running into reverse engineering projects that stall out with "to continue, I need to write my own debugger for the platform I'm targeting"

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:49 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     basically I need to watch the input buffer, the output buffer, about 15 random global variables, the half dozen or so local variables across 4 functions, and then a 768 byte dictionary

   • Embed this notice
     Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 12:08:50 JST Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I might just write my own debugger. the dosbox one is slightly terrible.