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   Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 14-May-2025 12:26:33 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

   it turns out what I thought was my MSC5.0 install WAS 5.1

   so I need to install MSC5.0, not MSC5.1

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 14-May-2025 12:26:28 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I'm currently figuring out functions through the amazing insight of "the linker is simple and linear"

     which means when I have _memmove, FUNC_1fb7_6db0, and _strcmp in the EXE, FUNC_1fb7_6db0 is probably not going to be an adlib sound driver. it's going to be something from the libc.

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     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 14-May-2025 12:26:29 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     current stats:
     Total funcs: 756
     Unnamed funcs: 360
     % named: 52.4%

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 14-May-2025 12:26:29 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     after extensive cross-referencing with the msc5.0 manual and the msc5.1 libraries being opened in a parallel copy of ghidra, I have finally been able to determine that the function I named sprintf_maybe is, in fact, _sprintf.

     my hard work, as always, pays amazing dividends

     Rich Felker repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 14-May-2025 12:26:30 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     __aaltstkovr

     that's a name, all right.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 14-May-2025 12:26:31 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     yeah it's definitely not 5.0.

     ugh. it's not 5.1 either. there may be some minor patch that I don't have access to

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     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 14-May-2025 12:26:32 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     also I manged to get my include and lib directories backwards. \lib was full of .h files, and \include was full of .lib files

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     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 14-May-2025 12:26:32 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     this is the kind of installation error that hasn't been possible since, like, 1991

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     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 16-May-2025 09:43:34 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I've now got a boolean that has three values (true, false, and 'image')

     but it's okay, I have a permit: I'm non-binary.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 16-May-2025 09:43:35 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     the compression has a fun quirk: images can be compressed either top to bottom or left to right.

     and the game switches between the two compression formats on a per-image basis.

     So the developers just compressed each image both ways and used the smaller one. clever.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 16-May-2025 09:43:35 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     their compression algorithm is 87 bytes long. as long as supporting two algorithms saved at least 87 bytes, it was worth it

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 16-May-2025 09:43:36 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     they did modify the random function though: the PoP one checks if the seed has been initialized. Carmen never does

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 16-May-2025 09:43:37 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I wonder if it'd be worth automating this. I don't currently have any tools to let me find functions in binary A that are also in binary B

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 16-May-2025 09:43:37 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     hey look, Prince of Persia uses the same setjmp/longjmp mainloop design!

     https://github.com/NagyD/SDLPoP/blob/7bd3bb85d8f7d4cb8ef72557ea0e65d80ba0906d/src/seg000.c#L197

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 16-May-2025 09:43:38 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I'm now doing some manual comparison of functions in PRINCE.EXE, and yep. they're byte-for-byte identical. There's shared code here! Awesome.

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     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 16-May-2025 09:43:39 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I've got my own code but it's not fully complete. I can't decompress all chunks yet

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 16-May-2025 09:43:39 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     yeah from looking at the SDLPoP code, they've got some very familiar looking decompression code. Awesome.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 16-May-2025 09:43:40 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     SDLPoP is based on reverse engineering of the DOS PoP, maybe I can see how they implement DAT file reading.

     https://github.com/NagyD/SDLPoP

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 16-May-2025 09:43:41 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     prince of persia 2 shows the same behavior. I think this is a different version of the Brøderbund Chunk Format

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 16-May-2025 09:43:41 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     The Backyard (1993) has the same later-chunk format

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 16-May-2025 09:43:42 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     oh wow, it looks like Prince of Persia (DOS) also uses this DAT format!

     Sadly, while the source for Prince of Persia is available... it's for the Apple II version. The DOS version is a complete reimplementation

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 16-May-2025 09:43:42 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     1991's The Treehouse uses DAT files, with some of the same names as carmen... but my parser fails on it. I think it's a variation in the format, so I'm a byte off or something

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     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 16-May-2025 09:43:43 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     the programmer credited for Galleons is Louis Ewens, who did work on several of the Carmen Sandiego games, but not the DOS-enhanced one.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 16-May-2025 09:43:44 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Total funcs: 758
     Unnamed funcs: 332
     % named: 56.2%

     pretty good for a day's work: nearly 4% done

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 16-May-2025 09:43:44 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     made a discovery:
     Galleons of Glory: The Secret Voyage of Magellan, released by Brøderbund in 1990, uses the same DAT format for its game files.

     I haven't looked into the EXE yet, but that definitely sounds like they're sharing code

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 16-May-2025 09:43:45 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay I've got all the libc stuff named, other than some internal functions (which I don't have names for), and one weird memmove-ish function that I just named "memmoveish"

     it looks very similar to memmove, but with an extra check or two, but I can't match it to anything in the library

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:12 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     yeah looks good.
     https://gist.github.com/foone/82de72a08f0e973fd3fa19b22d607d9a

     The misplaced entries (like Cairo having a leader hint of "left in a vehicle flying a red, white and black flag") are like that in the original data files. Brøderbund just got their hints miscategorized sometimes.

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     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:13 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     and Where in the U.S.A. Is Carmen Sandiego? (1990, Enhanced)

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     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:13 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     working on a full dat exporter, to build a JSON of all the hints.

     and I'm running into pronoun issues. Story of my fucking life.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:14 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I can now extract every image in every DAT for Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (1990, Enhanced)!

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:15 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I'm getting some crashes. I think I'm gonna switch away from CFFI to just making a C wrapper around the code, and subprocessing that. That'll make it easier to debug why it's crashing

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:15 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     (and it won't take out my python process when it crashes)

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:16 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     rome.png wasn't decompressed in a day

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:16 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay it's working, but only for even-width'd images.
     huh.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:17 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     well, that's closer. it's an image instead of a segfault, at least.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:18 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Rome is the first city in that list that uses the LZG_UD compression format, rather than the LZG_LR format. that's why it's crashing.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:19 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Here's the image: Tokyo!

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:19 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Tokyo: fine.
     Sydney: fine.
     Singapore: fine.
     San Marino: fine.
     Rome: PYTHON CRASHED

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:20 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I have successfully extracted the first image from the game, using the ported SDLPoP compression code!

     1 compression method down, 3 to go.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:20 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     do you have enough cursors, queen of mice?

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:21 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     right now I'm doing this sorta manually by running dosbox with cycles=30 and watching it draw in real time

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:21 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     the original PC ran an 8088 at 4.77mhz, which DOSBox emulates as 240 cycles.

     so this is approximately equivalent to a half-megahertz PC

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:22 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     tried bindiff: it doesn't like carmen.exe and binexport really doesn't like PRINCE.EXE, so that's a dead end for now

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:22 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     idea for debugging feature for dosbox:
     press a button, then for the next X seonds, all modifications to the display memory are recorded along with the backtrace of what code changed it. So you could see a button get drawn, and check what code did that.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:23 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I think all I'd be able to get from it is some canonical names of library functions

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:24 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     fun fact about Prince of Persia (which I am doing research on because of how it reuses code from Carmen or vice versa):

     A copy of it leaked with symbols included, but it's not the most normal version you can imagine... it's the mac port recompiled for MIPS.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:24 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     could this still be relevant to my x86 code? WHO KNOWS?

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:25 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I got halfway to googling this hint before remembering I'M FROM THERE (that state, at least. I'm from the other end of it)

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:26 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Idly playing Where in the USA is Carman Sandiego, and found an unexpected example of "things that have changed since 1990": The IMAGE for New Hampshire!
     It's the Old Man of the Mountain, which collapsed in 2004.

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:26 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     arg the way this game does travel can be really annoying
     if you are in New Delhi and need to go to the USSR, but misclick on Oslo instead of Moscow, you can't just fly to Moscow from Oslo. You have to go back to New Delhi first

   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 25-May-2025 13:19:27 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I'm like 90% sure that this game actually matches building types to what sorts of hints it gives you, and I'm also like 90% sure that this should have been obvious to me long ago