Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:21:15 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

   anyone feel like this is an invitation to crack a game?

   yes, even a bible game?

   • pistolero likes this.
   • Monika repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag: (ryanc@infosec.exchange)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:21:07 JST Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag:

     in reply to

     • Canageek

     @Canageek @foone I'm reminded of Earthbound...

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:21:08 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     there's definitely some way to make ghidra tell you the fill offset of the current instruction, but I can't remember it, so I go to Bytes view, select the next 32 bytes or so, and search the EXE in a hex editor:

     Bingo, at 0x882B. Change to EB & save it out to BBCRACKD.EXE

     pistolero likes this.
     Monika repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Canageek (canageek@wandering.shop)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:21:08 JST Canageek

     in reply to

     @foone Do you often get games checking for this and introducing errors? I know CRPG Addict has had issues with cracked games where they would introduce problems if you bypassed the copy protection in the most obvious way

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:21:09 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     sticking 74 1D into https://shell-storm.org/online/Online-Assembler-and-Disassembler/, it tells us it's "je 0x1f" (JE is a synonym for JZ).

     So stick JMP 0x1f into the assembler, and we get EB 1D back.

     So we need to find that 74 in the binary and turn it into EB

     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:21:10 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     naturally if you copy this program onto another disk (or a hard drive), all those sectors will be valid, so it'll fail the check.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:21:10 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Anyway that'd be a pain to replicate on a real disk or a virtual DOSBox hard drive.

     So, lets just patch out the check, or more accurately, the consequences of the check.

     at 1000:87eb we have 74 1d:
     JZ LAB_1000_880a

     LAB_1000_880a is after the print-uh-oh stuff, and it's jumping if the result of FUN_1000_8798 is non-NULL.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:21:11 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     They pass in sector_num of 0x2ca.

     So presumably on the original disks they did some special formatting (or manually marked that sector as bad?) so that sectors 0x2c9 and 0x2cb existed, but 0x2ca didn't.

     pistolero likes this.
     Monika repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:21:12 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     FUN_1000_8798 seems to be the magic. It gets the current drive, then calls FUN_1000_8739.

     FUN_1000_8739 in turn, calls a low-level BIOS disk drive call. Perfect chance to do some copy protection

     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:21:12 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Here we go. It gets passed a sector number, and it confirms that the sector doesn't exist, but the sector before and after it do.

     (with a free disk subsystem reset and read of sector 1 in the middle)

     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:21:13 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Which leads us right to FUN_1000_87c7, containing this code:

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:21:14 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     STEP ONE: unpack with UNP.

     UNP 4.12 Executable file restore utility, written by Ben Castricum, 07/22/96
     Special version registered to Otto Stock, distribution prohibited.

     processing file : ..\BB\BB.EXE
     DOS file size : 73447
     file-structure : executable (EXE)
     EXE part sizes : header 512 bytes, image 72935 bytes, overlay 0 bytes
     processed with : LINK V3.60, V3.64, V3.65 or V5.01.21 /EXEPACK
     action : decompressing... done
     new file size : 81792
     writing to file : ..\BB\BB.EXE

     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:21:14 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Step two: loaded it in ghidra, do a string search. We find the "Oh, oh! This doesn't seem to be an original disk!" at 1fed:27cd. Since this is segmented, we can't just search for that string.

     but we CAN do a scalar search for 0x27cd!

     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:56:03 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     And we're in the game with no "YOU PIRATED THIS!" message.

     Done.

     pistolero likes this.
     Monika repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:56:17 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     this angel has no idea I just cracked their game

     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:56:46 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     SHIT WHO TOLD THEM?

     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:56:47 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     it's 8x8 fixed width (like an NES font!) so we don't need to extract widths from anywhere to make a death generator

     pistolero likes this.
     Monika repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:56:48 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     and there at offset C13B in the decompressed EXE, we've got the font.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:33 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     why would I hack one game when I could hack EVERY GAME ?

     mwahahaha

     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:34 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I need to build me a tool to make this sort of research more automatic. I wanna give it a dozen copies of the game and have it tell me how many variants I have and what files are different, what dates are different, etc.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:34 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     then I just run it on EVERY GAME I CAN FIND

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:35 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     much to do. unfortunately it's 6am. so it'll have to be done elsewhen.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:35 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I'm doing a little research into copies of this game online, and so far I've found three distinct versions:

     1. a 1996-dated version
     2. a 1996-dated version with a savegame from 2021 because someone checked it worked and accidentally put the savegame in the zip/rar they distributed
     3. the same 1996 version, but with a 2009 date on the accidental save game.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:36 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     also need to:
     #1 figure out that FAT error. I'm in the wrong cluster or something.
     #2 write a wrong-sector instead of a missing-sector. writing only 17 sectors per tracks might accidentally leave behind an un-erased 18th sector from the previous formatting, and that's gonna confuse everything

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:37 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     also I don't have a good way to get a stream image out of 86box (because it uses a format I don't have any other tools that support, 86f), so I'm gonna have to run the code on a real PC and then image the resulting disk. Yet another reason to fix my code for 720kb disks

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:38 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I'm not 100% sure that disk file listing is original, but it seems to work. The game will ask you for different disks as you go around the program, and that seems to match

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:39 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     my version isn't exactly right, I was assuming 1.44mb disks. I need to recreate my tool but with 720kb in mind. Then I can make 3 disk images that'll work

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:39 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I also need to put the cracked version up on the internet archive to play, natch

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:40 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay the disks need to look like this:

     DISK1:
     bb.exe
     bb.ico
     dat1
     dat2
     dat4

     DISK2:
     dat5

     DISK3:
     dat3

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:41 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     this site says it has some cracks for it. It'd be interesting to see how they work, but I don't have an account for them:

     https://www.dosgame.at/bible-builder-patch/

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:41 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     the angel wants me to insert disk #1.

     man if I had a nickel for every time an angel talked to me about floppy disks...

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:42 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     this internet archive upload is technically mislabeled: it says it's the demo, but it's actually the full game: it's just stuck in demo mode because of the copy protection.

     https://archive.org/details/BibleBuilderSW1992EverbrightEducational

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:43 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     this article confirms it came on 720kb 3.5" floppies or 1.2mb 5.25" floppies:

     (there's CD copies on ebay. I ordered one, to see if they're using the same copy protection or if they came up with a different method/cracked it themselves)

     https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1992/12/19/exploring-scriptures-electronically/

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:43 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     and this warez NFO says it came on 3 720k disks.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:44 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I (mostly) WIN

     The game loaded with no "bad disk" complaints.

     it then froze because of there being some files missing from the disk, but I don't actually have enough space to write them all. I'm not really sure why that is.

     but that's a separate issue! the important thing is, I bypassed the copy protection without cracking it!

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:45 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I probably have an off-by-one error in the FAT edits

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:46 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     nope, crashes scandisk as well. Shame.

     lets see if I can copy files onto it

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:46 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Sector not found writing drive A
     Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?

     WHAT DO YOU MEAN? IT'S MARKED BAD!

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:47 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     bingo! it fails to read sector 0x2CA but neighboring sectors are fine.

     I wonder if it'll pass scandisk? Lemme mark the cluster bad first.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:48 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     they go to 0x03a7: that's 17 sectors, like I was trying to write, but presumably they're showing as BAD because I put them in ENTIRELY THE WRONG PLACE

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:48 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I told it to write to track 19h (dec 25)

     but it's track DEC 19 that I was aiming for.

     WHOOPS

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:49 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     BAD sectors start at 0x396? I was aiming for 0x02CA!

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:50 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I might just have to write a program to check every sector on the disk, to confirm where I'm overwriting

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:50 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     said program is now runnign

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:51 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     this would be easier to deal with if I didn't have to juggle 2 emulators, one of which has debugging and one of which supports flux-level disks

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:52 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     well that's probably not a great sign

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:52 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I wrote a simple test program to try reading the 3 affected sectors, and... they're all successfully read on my disk. I think I have YET ANOTHER off-by-one error, like I'm reformatting the wrong track.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:53 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     SCANDISK really doesn't like this disk. it's sitting here forever looking for a sector that doesn't exit

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:54 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     20 bad sectors? No, I fucked up BAD somewhere.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:54 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I had off by one errors in two directions! but sadly they didn't cancel each other out.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:55 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I may have created the disk

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:56 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     meh this is a pain. to the NASM!

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:56 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     note to self: before you try to CALL a function, make sure you have a stack first.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:57 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     arg. I should have guessed debug.com has a tiny tiny input buffer, and it can't handle being asked to hold 68 bytes at once

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:58 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     dang it, I started putting data into DEBUG.COM, then I realized I have no way to paste in the data I'm generating in a python script.

     I mean, not without designing a new keyboard...

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:58 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     keyboard written (or rather, a script for my scriptable automation keyboard project). it generates a disk format or passing to int 13 ah=5, but once it generates it it then types it in at the keyboard. So I'll run it, switch to 86box, and let the keyboardscript type it into DEBUG.COM

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:56:59 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay sector 2ca is on CHS 19/1/12

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:57:00 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     meaning this is a trickier compression than I thought: They left out a sector! it's just not on the disk.

     They had to do this in the formatting step!

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:57:00 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     looking into the freedos FORMAT source. maybe I can easily modify it to skip over 0x2CA

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:57:01 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     oooooh! I'm totally wrong.

     this is doing an int 25 DOS 1+ - ABSOLUTE DISK READ.

     I set a cluster to BAD.
     This thing doesn't even USE clusters! it's raw sector access!

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:57:02 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     1 bad sector, eh? hopefully it's the right one!

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:57:02 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Doesn't work. Back to DOSBox so I can have a debugger!

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:57:03 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     (I'm trying to recreate the copy protection)

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:57:04 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     you might notice I did DAT1, DAT2, DAT3, and then DAT5: DAT4 is completely different and apparently part of the copy protection?

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:57:04 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Anatoly Shashkin💾

     hey @dosnostalgic: isn't there a way to mark clusters as bad in Norton Utilities? I didn't see it under DiskEdit

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:57:05 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I modified some of my Carmen Sandiego scripts to handle its files, so now I can see what chunks are where:

     https://gist.github.com/foone/a8e2455dd0c5456e513cf69c56b727c8

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:57:06 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     the file DAT3 has chunks named SODOMA and SODOMB

     Come on guys, just 23 more and you'll be onto something!

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:57:06 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     there's some kind of compression going on here that's inexplicably bad?

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:57:07 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     NIV & Revised Standard say "You shall not steal."
     Living Bible says "You must not steal."

     Only the KJV says "Thou shalt not steal."

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:57:07 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Come on guys, you could have made it switch between the different versions of the bible based on the current setting of which version to use!

     I'm gonna have to hack that in, aren't I?

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:57:08 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     The funny thing is: They're inconsistent with the fact it says "Thou shalt not steal".

     Why? Because this game has FOUR BIBLES in it. Only one of those is the King James Version.

     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:57:09 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     That one is a joke, but the credits do actually have an anti-piracy message followed by Exodus 20:15: Thou Shalt Not Steal

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 23:41:27 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     a fun part of naming functions that you don't understand yet is that it makes it look like the program was written by a really terrible programmer with a special weakness for function naming.

     calculate_some_things()

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
     Monika repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 23:41:28 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     code that indicates you're on 16-bit segmented x86 or you're about to break your program:

     *(uint *)0x0 = uVar2;

     Monika repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 23:41:29 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     SOME PROGRAMMERS NEED TO BE STOPPED

     alloc16((((DAT_1000_c79a + 0xfU >> 1 | (uint)((DAT_1000_c79c & 1) != 0) << 0xf) >> 1 |
     (uint)((DAT_1000_c79c >> 1 & 1) != 0) << 0xf) >> 1 |
     (uint)((DAT_1000_c79c >> 2 & 1) != 0) << 0xf) >> 1 |
     (uint)((DAT_1000_c79c >> 3 & 1) != 0) << 0xf);

     Monika repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 23:41:30 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     it checks each DAT file it opens to see if it starts with MZ.

     I guess it can accidentally open EXE files or something?

     Monika repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 23:41:31 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     eww, this file format doesn't store the width, it stores the stride.
     So it's (320,200) for an EGA 640x200 image, since it's 4 bits per pixel.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 23:41:32 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     the game is running at 640x350 resolution, an EGA format.

     POP QUIZ: why did they split the opening image into two separate chunks in the data file?

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 00:59:52 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     COULD YOU BE MORE SPECIFIC PLZ

     Monika repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 00:59:56 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I found the decompression routine and I hate it. it's big and complicated and there's calls to subfunctions.

     reimplementing this will be a nightmare

     Monika repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 00:59:58 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     step 1:
     fill a table of 256 words with 0xFFFF

     <dasharezone>OH SHIT IS THAT A MOTHERFUCKING HUFFMAN TABLE?</dasharezone>