Notices by Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)

it landed on the 17th! It was only in the air for 126 hours.

so I fly into Reykjavík, and immediately sleep for 8 hours. In the morning, I can go to either the airport or the hotel, but it'll take 3 hours to get to either.

Question: where am I right now, if I'm not at the hotel or the airport?

they read from the ports instead of measuring time, because that'll take a certain amount of time on x86. I'm too tired to confirm if their timing logic is sound. It's possible they're just assuming the PC is slow enough that it'll wait long enough

They initialized the SoundBlaster DSP backwards.
You're supposed to send a 0 to the reset port, wait 3 microseconds, send a 1, then wait up to 100 microseconds for an 0xAA to show up on the data port.

They instead send a 1, then a 0, then immediately start trying to read the data port.

I bet broderbund bought this sound code. It feels completely different: This was either compiled on a different compiler or was written in assembly.

they're passing single bytes to functions! C widens integer parameters to a word, so on a 16bit system, they're passed in 16-bit registers.

yeah a compiler doesn't just start using CF to return bools instead of AX. This is assembly.

they're sending a... internal soundblaster test command?
(DSP 0xF0)

I dunno why this code is like this.

I just found a function (inside another function!) that's a fixed delay. How long is it?
it's a loop that runs 256 times!

I suspect there may be an issue here: I identified a variable as containing the Soundblaster IO port, right? and I'm assuming everything that uses it is Soundblaster code.

But it may just be "soundcard IO port" and there's other sound device code mixed in here. So that's why some of it doesn't make sense as soundblaster, it's actually tandy 3voice or something

that's so cute that this code considers "256 instructions" to be a meaningful length of time.

the menu system limits menus to having a maximum of 32 items.

which is weird because ONLY 17 WILL FIT ON SCREEN

there's code in here specifically to detect if it's running on an IBM PS/1 by looking at the CMOS area?

WHAT THE

I did some experimenting with MSVC 5.1, and it's weird. I get the same strings in the exe as carmen.exe has, but the code itself looks completely different.

either I set up my compiler wrong, or this game is full of assembly even for very simple functions

byte-identical.

this is a compiler & linker from 1988, it doesn't understand how to merge identical copies of functions apparently

I don't know exactly what this function does (I know it sets some flags based on something in the graphics context) but I DO know one important thing about it:

they included it in the final binary FOUR TIMES.

my order tracking says my package arrived at the airport (on the other side of the pacific) on the 12th, and has been en-route ever since

that's one slow plane with a lot of fuel

@icil I think they re-enabled their original NSFW filter which just looks for flesh tones.

4chan's dead, tumblr is NSFW-warning people for posting arms, bluesky didn't upload the screenshot of tumblr censoring the arms, only mastodon still functions!

I love how MSDN is like:

STRUCTURE.lfpMember:

This property is ignored.
Windows 2000/XP: it does something very different and important, but what kind of a weirdo would be coding for XP in 2025?