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   Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-May-2025 12:54:56 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

   the one downside to reverse engineering middle-era DOS games is that they're still on floppy disks, which means no one accidentally ships the whole debug symbols. every kilobyte is precious here!

   • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-May-2025 12:56:50 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     the CD-ROM really made that a reality. Then we could accidentally ship all the debug symbols in an early build sent off to pc gamer

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-May-2025 12:57:04 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     or you could do what Pipeworks did in a couple Wii games:

     don't bother stripping the debugging symbols, because the final DOL file won't contain them anyway!

     then just accidentally ship the entire ELF binary next to the DOL binary because you messed up your batch files

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 29-May-2025 12:57:33 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     btw my ad-hoc "eras" for DOS that I just invented in that post:

     early era: text or CGA, usually assumes 8mhz (so you have to turn off turbo), may even be a booter. 5.25" disks. freeware and bad ports.

     mid era: supports 5 video standards but only ever uses 16 colors max. comes on a 3.5" disk or two. might support soundblaster but only use it as adlib, while the sound effects are still pc speaker. shareware and edutainment abounds.

     late era: CD-rom based, super-vga. big boxed retail software.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.