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1. Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 15:46:30 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

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

   yes, even a bible game?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 15:48:56 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 15:51:25 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!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 15:53:12 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Which leads us right to FUN_1000_87c7, containing this code:

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 15:59:19 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:08:29 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)

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:09:10 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.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:10:17 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.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:11:46 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.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:14:06 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:15:58 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:17:01 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

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

     Done.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:19:37 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Canageek

     @Canageek not usually. I've run into one application that did a tricksy anti-cracking behavior: It loaded some plugins when the "hey this is trialware, please buy" dialog appeared, so if you patched that nag screen out, you'd have no plugins

   • Canageek (canageek@wandering.shop)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:19:38 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

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

     in reply to

     • Dot Maetrix

     @DotMaetrix apparently!

     (I personally am a bridge-builder, not a bible-builder. Though I have been tempted to write my own bible more than once)

   • Dot Maetrix (dotmaetrix@chitter.xyz)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:21:11 JST Dot Maetrix

     in reply to

     @foone you're telling me a Bible built this game?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:22:15 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     this angel has no idea I just cracked their game

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:28:38 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:29:57 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:36:56 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Tom Forsyth

     @TomF fun fact: that distinctive G is how I double checked I had the right font

   • Tom Forsyth (tomf@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:36:57 JST Tom Forsyth

     in reply to

     @foone That capital G is a crime. Lucky thing this game isn't going to have to use it for anyone important.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 16:42:15 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     SHIT WHO TOLD THEM?

   • Heathen 🐈 ↔️ AO :verified_gay: (heathen_cat@furs.social)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 17:01:00 JST Heathen 🐈 ↔️ AO :verified_gay:

     in reply to

     @foone
     Thou shalt not copy the floppy!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 17:04:35 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 17:10:25 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.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 17:12:03 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."

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 17:13:59 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?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 17:15:03 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!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 17:20:13 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 17:45:25 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 17:46:02 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?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 18:26:42 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 18:27:10 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     (I'm trying to recreate the copy protection)

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 18:33:51 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 18:37:27 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 18:43:22 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!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 18:44:05 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!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 18:49:43 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 19:22:18 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 19:28:11 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...

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 19:41:44 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Olivier Galibert

     @galibert at the moment, just an emulator format.

   • Olivier Galibert (galibert@piaille.fr)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 19:41:45 JST Olivier Galibert

     in reply to

     @foone With a upd765, it's not trivial (it is with a wd1772 and friends). What is your target though, a real floppy or some emulator format?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 19:42:46 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 19:51:25 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 20:00:45 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     meh this is a pain. to the NASM!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 20:14:43 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 20:36:39 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I may have created the disk

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 20:49:17 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 21:00:02 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 21:00:57 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • vfig

     @vfig no, this is a mostly death-generated-unrelated bit of nonsense

   • vfig (vfig@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 21:00:58 JST vfig

     in reply to

     @foone wait, are you adding norton disk doctor to the death generator??

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 21:09:44 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 21:13:30 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     well that's probably not a great sign

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 21:35:09 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • DrYak

     @dryak I'm not sure yet!

   • DrYak (dryak@mstdn.science)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 21:35:10 JST DrYak

     in reply to

     @foone but did the original game ship on weirdly formatted disks? Or did they merely punch a whole in the physical media?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 21:38:30 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.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 21:39:06 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 21:39:41 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 21:53:23 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     said program is now runnign

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 21:54:03 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Jonathan Evraire

     @evraire that sounds like a lot of work for 5am!

   • Jonathan Evraire (evraire@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 21:54:04 JST Jonathan Evraire

     in reply to

     @foone Add support for flux-level disks to emulator? 🤔

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 21:58:58 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 21:59:36 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 22:01:35 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 22:05:01 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • BaffinSquid

     @baffinsquid clearly you are learned in the ways of scripture!

   • BaffinSquid (baffinsquid@mastodon.me.uk)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 22:05:03 JST BaffinSquid

     in reply to

     @foone But Exodus is in the Old Testament, while newer instructions in Mark 16:15 state "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation", which in terms of physical media should be interpreted as "Copy that Floppy"

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 22:10:53 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.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 22:13:59 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     nope, crashes scandisk as well. Shame.

     lets see if I can copy files onto it

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 22:15:50 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

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

     WHAT DO YOU MEAN? IT'S MARKED BAD!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 22:16:21 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 22:20:25 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!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 22:22:49 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/

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 22:24:10 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 22:29:17 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 22:34:02 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/

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 22:49:00 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...

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 22:56:52 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 22:57:36 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 22:58:08 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 22:59:16 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 23:00:40 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 23:02:38 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 23:06:11 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 23:11:40 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Medea Vanamonde🏳️‍⚧️ ♀

     @MishaVanMollusq more importantly, can the tower of babel run doom?

   • Medea Vanamonde🏳️‍⚧️ ♀ (mishavanmollusq@sfba.social)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 23:11:41 JST Medea Vanamonde🏳️‍⚧️ ♀

     in reply to

     @foone can you build a tower of Babel in it?

   • Rue Mohr (ruenahcmohr@infosec.exchange)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 09:25:19 JST Rue Mohr

     in reply to

     @foone I'd be curious to see what fsck.msdos would do with it.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 09:25:19 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Rue Mohr

     @RueNahcMohr nothing, I think. This is lower level than filesystem

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:47:37 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.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:48:47 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.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:49:19 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     then I just run it on EVERY GAME I CAN FIND

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 15:51:26 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

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

     mwahahaha

   • vxo (vxo@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 16:03:20 JST vxo

     in reply to

     @foone

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 21:34:49 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?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 21:41:38 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • UpLateGeek

     @UpLateGeek Coming Soon! the new 21st century bible from Church™ that includes "THOU SHALT NOT INFRINGE COPYRIGHT" as a commandment!

   • UpLateGeek (uplategeek@bitbang.social)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 21:41:39 JST UpLateGeek

     in reply to

     @foone it’s not even stealing, it’s copyright infringement. Two completely different things.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 21:49:14 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Jernej Simončič �

     @jernej__s it's planar, but that's not directly why they're doing it. It's because they don't want to have chunks that decompress to more than 64kb, because then they'd have to span segments

   • Jernej Simončič � (jernej__s@infosec.exchange)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 21:49:15 JST Jernej Simončič �

     in reply to

     @foone 64k segment limit? Is EGA 640x350 mode also planar like VGA?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 21:50:52 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.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 22:56:06 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?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 23:29:11 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);

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 23:38:28 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

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

     *(uint *)0x0 = uVar2;

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 23:40:29 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()

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 23:41:05 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     COULD YOU BE MORE SPECIFIC PLZ

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Sunday, 09-Feb-2025 23:49:31 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

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 00:05:37 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>

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 00:09:08 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     calculate_some_things CHANGES DS? THE FUCK?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 00:10:38 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     segmented x86 is great, because in this code:

     MOV AX, [1234]
     CALL 0823:0000
     MOV AX, [1234]

     You can't be sure that AX is set to the same thing, even if the function at 0823:0000 doesn't touch the memory at 1234. It might be a DIFFERENT 1234, because 0823:0000 changed the value of DS

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 00:14:18 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     that tells me that someone wrote this in assembly because compilers do not do this.

     frankly, humans shouldn't do it either, but unfortunately nothing stops them

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 00:16:59 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     void allocate_36800_bytes(void)

     reasonable functions that imply good things about how your program is designed

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 00:18:43 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I know programmers who use return values and parameters and they're all cowards

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 00:21:06 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     this program is either doing something sneaky and clever (overwriting its own code dynamically) or it's doing something stupid (calling a function with no body)

     I pray (no pun intended) that it's the latter

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 00:22:41 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I would say it's the result of a badly written debug macro, ie there's a function that only prints #IFDEF DEBUG, instead of a function that's only called if DEBUG is defined.

     except it takes no parameters, so that'd only work if it's a debug function that examples globals and prints about them.

     which is possible, this program is global-heavy

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 00:23:51 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I typo'd that as "global-heaven" which I guess is also technically true, in more way than one. Heaven is a big part of this game.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 00:25:01 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Wolf480pl

     @wolf480pl it is! and a very accurate one that describes what it does

   • Wolf480pl (wolf480pl@mstdn.io)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 00:25:02 JST Wolf480pl

     in reply to

     @foone looks like a reverse-engineered name :P

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 00:36:59 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • trucy 🏳️‍⚧️🔞

     @trucy main? C wimps!

     REAL programmers put everything in _entry

   • trucy 🏳️‍⚧️🔞 (trucy@girlcock.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 00:37:01 JST trucy 🏳️‍⚧️🔞

     in reply to

     @foone using functions is a sign of weakness, put all code in main()

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 00:51:35 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     char * strlen(void)

     I AM GOING TO TRY TO EXPLODE YOU WITH YOUR MIND

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 00:52:39 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     call it twice in a row! that makes even more sense!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 00:53:13 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     sometimes the length of a string takes some time to settle, so to avoid race conditions you should always call strlen twice and check that the results match

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 01:01:00 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Usagi

     @usagi I pray for anything that lets me avoid having to reverse engineer self-modifying code

   • Usagi (usagi@moe.onl)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 01:01:01 JST Usagi

     in reply to

     @foone@digipres.club You pray for ghost functions? :neocat_flop:

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 01:29:10 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     CLI
     MOV SP ,word ptr CS :[DAT_1000_c780 ]
     STI

     ALRIGHT, FUCK YOU. I'M GOING TO BED

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 01:29:46 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     changing THE STACK POINTER? in a function called multiple times in the decompress?

     WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 12:43:46 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I had the bad idea of using 16bit protected mode to help me extract the decompress function, but there's a lot of reasons why that is probably a very bad idea

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 13:03:22 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I kinda want to yank the function out of the EXE into a separate tool and just call it remotely, but it's so globals-based that I'm worried it'd break writing some address I'm not emulating.

     So being able to have the pages not loaded and watching for page faults would be useful! unfortunately, 16bit real mode

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 13:04:13 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     maybe I should modify the emulator to give me Fake Protection. I need to write my own x86 emulator.
     again. sigh.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 13:06:00 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     11 years ago!?

     https://github.com/foone/DecompVM

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 13:07:52 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     it supports 20 entire instructions! (assuming you count Jcc as one, if not it's 25)

     is that the same 25 instructions this code uses? NO!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 13:08:19 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     also FUCK I wrote a 32bit x86 emulator! I need a 16bit emulator!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 13:11:48 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     yes that's right, this isn't the first time I've gone "writing an x86 emulator would be easier than understanding this decompression code"

     I hate decompression code THAT MUCH

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 13:12:15 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     in fairness, x86 is documented. I can look up how it works. I can't do that with this decompression

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 13:18:07 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • wilkie

     @wilkie it's entirely possible!

   • wilkie (wilkie@archived.software)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 13:18:08 JST wilkie

     in reply to

     @foone are we the same person. I'm thankful to relate to somebody else in this very specific way.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 13:22:22 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     what I want is a way to iteratively isolate a function.
     Like I tell it "hey, grab these bytes from this EXE. that's a function with this calling function. now call it, but trap whenever it accesses global data I haven't defined or calls other functions"

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 13:22:55 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     then I can go through and add those extra functions until I have a magic Just Run The Function tool

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 13:23:37 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I would also like this to be less than the slowest thing possible, but unfortunately my experience with x86-on-python has shown that to be tricky.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 13:24:10 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Stumpy The Mutt

     @StumpyTheMutt oh god group 4. had to deal with that in a previous life: the problem was that we had millions of group-4 encoded TIFFs, and needed to give them to users as PDFs.

     so we had a tool that exploited the fact that both PDF and TIFF support group4, so it just swapped the headers. It, uh, mostly worked!

   • Stumpy The Mutt (stumpythemutt@social.linux.pizza)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 13:24:11 JST Stumpy The Mutt

     in reply to

     @foone Many eons ago I wrote a fax Group 4 decompressor in x86 assembler. Several senior people looked over the code and we all worked hard to remove every extraneous clock cycle we could find. It worked great and was really fast, but it would not be easy to figure out without the extensive commentary I added.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 13:33:42 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     16bit decompression is way worse than 32bit decompression, btw.

     there's multiple different DS here and I'm not sure when it's changing. sometimes it's loading stuff from 4 and 8 and that can't be normal, those aren't real addresss

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 13:38:34 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay so, see the "mov ES, [bp+06]"? That's normal code that is getting the arguments to the function, right? which are at +4 and +6 on the original stack pointer. They're accessing through BP because the stack pointer changes when they push those other registers, to preserve them.

     HOWEVER, look at the DS and SS. SS is 1810, but DS is 2811.
     The problem is that that instruction should be accessing DS:bp+06, not SS:bp+04. and those are DIFFERNT

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 13:41:50 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     SS:BP+06 is in linear addresses, 27748h

     but DS:BP+04 is 37758h

     those are different places. this shouldn't work, unless I'm missing something very badly

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 13:45:21 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     it IS pulling from the SS register, but I do not know why

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 13:52:13 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     wikipedia has a great article documenting the ModR/M format used in x86 encoding, including a very handy table explaining how it works (in 16bit mode, too!), but it never mentions segment selectors once.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ModR/M

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 13:58:28 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I'm now reading the DOSBox source code to try and figure this out because I have a normal life

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 14:10:28 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay it's doing some weird effective-address calculating that means there's an implicit SS: prefix on that address.

     Ghidra is not showing this to me, which is very very confusing

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 14:11:04 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I can't find the exact details but that's definitely what's happening

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 14:20:48 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     after it makes that array of 256 0xFFFFs, it makes another array that's the values 0-255.

     suspicious. definitely doing some kind of huffmanning

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 14:28:42 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     the function that sneakily changes DS also changes SI.

     fun.

     this is definitely hand written assembly because compilers make more sense than this

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 14:36:25 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • vfig

     @vfig thanks!

   • vfig (vfig@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 14:36:26 JST vfig

     in reply to

     @foone ah here, page 2-13 of https://edge.edx.org/c4x/BITSPilani/EEE231/asset/8086_family_Users_Manual_1_.pdf

   • vfig (vfig@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 14:36:27 JST vfig

     in reply to

     @foone its a long time since i did 16 bit x86, but iirc SP and BP use SS segment by default, unless theres an override prefix.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 14:37:00 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Tom Forsyth

     @TomF thanks!

   • Tom Forsyth (tomf@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 14:37:01 JST Tom Forsyth

     in reply to

     @foone Yes, I found a StackOverflow answer confirming my memory. Not very compelling I know but:

     "Memory operands using esp or ebp as the base register default to SS, and so do the implicit accesses for stack instructions like push/pop/call/ret."

     (odd they reference esp and ebp rather than sp and bp but OK)

   • Tom Forsyth (tomf@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 14:37:02 JST Tom Forsyth

     in reply to

     @foone Wait wait wait I vaguely remember this. Hang on, I will 100% check this, but FROM HAZY MEMORY by default if the base register is BP or SP, then it's assumed to be a stack reference, and thus use SS.

     Again, lemme check...

   • Tom Forsyth (tomf@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 14:37:03 JST Tom Forsyth

     in reply to

     @foone Segment selector overrides is here:
     https://wiki.osdev.org/X86-64_Instruction_Encoding#Legacy_Prefixes
     0x36 is the SS segment override, but I'm not seeing it. You can see the 0x2E which is the CS: segment override.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 16:22:21 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Olivier Galibert

     @galibert god I WISH I could find a game written by people as mentally twisted as to attempt a multi-threaded cooperative-multitasking DECOMPRESSION ALGORITHM on DOS.

   • Olivier Galibert (galibert@piaille.fr)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 16:22:22 JST Olivier Galibert

     in reply to

     @foone Cooperative multithreading?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 16:47:58 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Olivier Galibert

     @galibert but the disk IO api is all synchronous! by technical necessity, really... although I guess maybe you could bypass both DOS and the BIOS and write to the controller directly, and use DMA and handle the IRQ yourself...

     that might pass in the demoscene if you wanted to have smooth animation while loading

   • Olivier Galibert (galibert@piaille.fr)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 16:47:59 JST Olivier Galibert

     in reply to

     @foone well, you put the file reading and the actual decompression in different threads, switching when out of data... I could see not entirely sane people doing it

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 17:17:09 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     this is a totally normal thing to think in 2025, guys.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 17:29:22 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     trying to script the DOSBox-X debugger by making a keyboard probably counts as using my powers for evil.

     I might still do it though. Someday I'll make a nice clean way to interface with DOSBox from python, but that would require a lot more work than just using a keyboard I made

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 17:38:20 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     "what if I just smuggled in filenames using floating point variables?"

     VERY NORMAL THOUGHTS, FOONE

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 17:47:01 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     anyone know off the top of their heads how many characters you can reliably store in your standard x87 floating point register?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 17:55:35 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     sadly I'm giving up on the floating point idea. I'm just gonna rewrite the EXE between every iteration. it's a bit easier.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 18:36:23 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I ran into a minor problem because I had to rewrite some code, as I'd written "MOV DS,CS" which won't work: you can only move to segment registers like DS from general purpose registers.

     So I rewrote it as:
     MOV AX, CS
     MOV CS, AX

     Yeah that second line is a typo. I typed CS instead of DS. CS is where it gets instructions from, so the x86 will not let you write to it, although the encoding allows it. So yeah, that didn't work, it triggered a CPU fault

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 18:59:32 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     setting the ORG wrong in your x86 assembly really fucks it up. It was calculating the addresses all wrong!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 19:10:05 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     fopen("w","1234568.ext")

     WHY ISN'T IT WORKING?, I say, while hitting myself in the head

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 19:30:52 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I miss the days when I could write:

     fwrite(ptr, size, 1, fp);

     and not worry about what segment ptr is in

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 19:32:50 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     ugh why am I even using fwrite. it's a pain when I'm writing assembly. I'm gonna give up and just call int 21h

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 19:46:41 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     normal thoughts for a python programmer:

     "THIS C SHIT IS TOO HIGH LEVEL!"

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 19:50:00 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I can't tell if I'm 5 bytes off when writing out this file. That's REALLY annoying

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 19:51:23 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     fuck it I'm overdumping every chunk by 5 bytes and I'll figure if I need to trim them later

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:11:41 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • gatinha fofa da navi

     @lizzy the what?

   • gatinha fofa da navi (lizzy@social.vlhl.dev)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:12:00 JST gatinha fofa da navi

     in reply to
     @foone you forgot the 7
   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:13:30 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     YES! I extracted and decompressed every chunk in DAT1!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:15:10 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     so I hacked the game like this:

     I wrote a little assembly program that basically just goes:
     unsigned short size=64020;
     ptr=loadChunk("internal.ext");
     f=fopen("12345678.ext","wb");
     fwrite(ptr,size,1,f);
     fclose(f);
     exit(0);

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:16:08 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     then I compile that and I wrote a tiny python script to inject it into the EXE (by just copying the old EXE and pasting my shit in at an offset), and then I call that EXE once per chunk.

     well, I call a dosbox-x exe with a conf set to just run it and then exit.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:17:06 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     but since I didn't want to deal with writing code to parse the size and filenames and shit from the command line, I just have my script write a new EXE per chunk.
     It just takes the old EXE, applies patches over where size, "internal.ext", and "12345678.ext" are in the EXE, then it runs that new EXE

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:17:48 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     (that's why the filenames are a full 8.3 characters, so I can overwrite them with any valid DOS name)

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:18:32 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     it worked successfully so of course as soon as I try it on DAT2, it starts hanging.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:18:58 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     TO THE DEBUGGER, BATMAN!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:19:37 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • gatinha fofa da navi

     @lizzy oh right. I missed that. hah

   • gatinha fofa da navi (lizzy@social.vlhl.dev)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:19:47 JST gatinha fofa da navi

     in reply to
     @foone 6 is followed by 8. in the filename
   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:27:07 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     ahh, I forgot the implicit state.
     I'm injecting into the game when it first tries to load the title screen, which it does before it loads DAT2,DAT3,DAT5

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:27:41 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     hopefully I can just patch it to load DAT2 instead. That might break if it needs to use DAT1 resources first... I don't THINK it does? but I'm not sure.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:29:07 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     ... they put BIB100.MUS in DAT1 and DAT2.

     MOTHERFUCKER

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:29:40 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I can't just extract them all to the same folder, because there's duplicates. possibly different duplicates!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:33:41 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I should do this to Carmen when I get back to that project. Then instead of understanding it's compression, I just bypass it completely

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:42:08 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     yep, changing it to DAT2 breaks it. I can't swap DAT2 into the place of DAT1, because it does indeed need other chunks from it.

     UGH.

     maybe I can just add my own call to load_dat_file at the top of my assembly. I do NOT want to have to relocate it, that sounds like it'd be REALLY FUCKING HARD

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:42:42 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     my code starts right AFTER the chunk is loaded. I'd have to move it. MOTHERFUCKER

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:43:23 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     ALRIGHT HERE'S WHAT WE'RE DOING. WE'RE DOING IT LIVE.

     loadChunk is gonna fail. Fine.
     We ignore it, then call load_dat_file on the correct dat, then we call loadChunk again!

     This is stupid, but it means I don't have to move the fucking start position!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:53:05 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     IT WORKS! I have DAT2 now!

     lets see how it breaks when we try DAT3...

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 20:58:40 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     all dats extracted. I need to write some code to convert the ART files, but they're simple and I understand most of them already. but now I have 89 example files to work on.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 21:14:18 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     whoops, I got my lefts and rights backwards. silly little-endian formats.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 21:16:35 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     there are two ART formats: TITLEA.ART is the first one, and TITLEB.ART is the second one.

     ewww. two halves of one image but they're encoded differently!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 21:27:50 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     WHERE'S YOUR HEAD?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 21:34:22 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I think what's happening is that there's some animation supported in this format, and the extra animation bytes in the header are throwing off the parsing of the image (explaining the color and scrolling) and then I don't support the sprites yet (explaining the missing head)

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 21:42:00 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I fixed the scrolling problem, but the palettes are still deeply fuckt.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 22:06:58 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay I think I've got all the non-animated images extracting properly.

     other than one of jesuses which I can't figure out which palette it uses.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 22:07:57 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     sadly this includes SODOMA.ART and SODOMB.ART, which render completely inaccurately.

     but hopefully I will be able to fix this tomorrow

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 22:12:14 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Trammell Hudson

     @th would you happen to be colorblind? :)

   • Trammell Hudson (th@social.v.st)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 22:12:16 JST Trammell Hudson

     in reply to

     @foone they're the same picture?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 08:14:08 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Computeum Vilshofen

     @Computeum sadly my COM is getting injected into an EXE, so I do have to worry about segment registers. I'm existing inside its memory model.

     The FCB handling is a good idea, but I was worried any arg handling the game already did would have messed it up. I've seen so many games overwrite the args with their own shit, it's a pain

   • Computeum Vilshofen (computeum@mastodon.bayern)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 08:14:09 JST Computeum Vilshofen

     in reply to

     @foone May I insert some really old news? DOS already parses the command line for you, putting up to two file names into prepared FCB. Add a zero byte and you'll fine to use stream calls - or stay with FCB handling.Using a 128 bye loop does no longer make a notable speed difference with today's machines due all their huge blocks and caching...

     https://archive.org/details/The_MS-DOS_Encyclopedia_Ray_Duncan/page/109/mode/1up?view=theater

     Also, doing it as a com program (tiny memory model) saves the need to copy segment registers or care for them at all. Plain code like on an 8 bit CPU :))

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 15:54:57 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I did some looking into the file format. It's tricky because it doesn't seem to ever declare how many sub-images are in an image, it just determines it by the header length, and the header length is something like n*11+48?+16? and I'm only like 80% sure of those numbers.

     I need to find the code in the binary for loading this. I've just been staring at the hex. it seemed simple enough, but the multi-image format is more complex than I thought

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 15:55:35 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     it's definitely multi-image, rather than simply animated. For example, the puzzle pieces at the end of a run are all in one chunk, they're just different images inside it.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 16:04:27 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     time for some late-night reading

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Feb-2025 00:19:18 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     no, angel, I will never give you up

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Feb-2025 00:32:53 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • RetroVideoGames

     @retrovg nah, this uses on-disk copy protection.

     although now I'm amused by the idea of a bible game that makes you enter verses from the bible to prove you're a christian

   • RetroVideoGames (retrovg@cwb.social)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Feb-2025 00:32:55 JST RetroVideoGames

     in reply to

     @foone is this a copy protection screen? It sounds like heresy.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Feb-2025 02:12:01 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • SapphicSelene :priconne_uzuki:
     • RetroVideoGames

     @sapphicselene @retrovg This game is actually quite liberal on which translation it uses! It lets you pick between 4 editions:
     * Revised Standard
     * King James
     * New International
     * The Living Bible

   • SapphicSelene :priconne_uzuki: (sapphicselene@sakurajima.moe)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Feb-2025 02:12:02 JST SapphicSelene :priconne_uzuki:

     in reply to

     • RetroVideoGames

     @foone @retrovg I get locked from the game for using the NRSV instead of "The KJV that God Himself wrote down" lol

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Feb-2025 02:12:48 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Mondobizarrro

     @Mondobizarrro he might, especially if you live in Sodom

   • Mondobizarrro (mondobizarrro@social.xenofem.me)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Feb-2025 02:12:50 JST Mondobizarrro

     in reply to
     @foone that angel looks like he is about to murder my entire family
   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Feb-2025 02:27:56 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     what is the theological use in teaching children to identify hellenistic-era settlements in the Levant?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Feb-2025 02:37:06 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • nil :demisexual_flag:

     @nil I know, right? I can't wait to extract all their animations.

   • nil :demisexual_flag: (nil@furry.engineer)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Feb-2025 02:37:07 JST nil :demisexual_flag:

     in reply to

     @foone i love the lil guy on the candle

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Feb-2025 02:39:27 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     PROTESTANT SPOTTED

     (different religious traditions number the 10 commandments differently. The catholic 4th commandment is "Honour thy father and thy mother")

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Feb-2025 07:21:41 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     oh hello there spooky mario 64 creepypasta, what are YOU doing here in this EGA bible game?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 21:15:38 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay I'm back to trying to do the floppy hack correctly (so, on a DD disk) and OH NO I have to figure out where the sector is again.

     I hate converting between LBA and CHS

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 21:18:50 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     track 44, side B, sector 3

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 21:32:16 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     nope fucked up again

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 21:34:06 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     mov CX, 1300h ; TRACK 44

     HEY FOONE, IS 44 IN HEX "13"?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 21:38:47 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     BTW "BAD" is technically incorrect. Those sectors are not bad, in the sense we usually mean it: a spot on the disk that can no longer correctly store data, and reading from it will give checksum mismatches.

     No, those sectors are just not there. The drive controller is on the track, reading for those sectors numbers, and it finds nothing that matches.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 21:40:31 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I'd love to show you what the low-level track looks like but I can't load .86f files the HxE tools. Once I do this on a real machine I'll have an image, though

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 21:45:03 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     FAILED AGAIN.

     somehow sectors 321h, 323h, and 329h are bad.

     the fuck?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 21:48:27 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     "Note: This function does not set the INT 1E vector to point at the returned parameter table; it is the caller's responsibility to do so "

     whaaaat

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 21:53:36 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     so the notes for int 13h/AH=05h say to call int13h/AH=17h first, to set up int 1E
     but the notes for Int 13h/AH=17h say not to use it, because it doesn't support 1.44mb drives, so use int 13h,AH=18h instead. but int13h, AH=18h doesn't set up INT 1E, which is THE ONLY REASON I'M CALLING IT

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 21:57:24 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     fortunately DOS has a simple syscall I can use to set the vector. And surely the int 13h,AH=18 returns the new vector in the same registers as the dos set-interrupt syscall, right?

     RIGHT?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 21:58:02 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     NOPE! int13h, AH=18 returns it in ES:DI and int 21h,AH=25h takes it in DS:DI

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 22:29:29 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay I think the problem may be slightly weirder: norton disk edit told me the wrong format for this drive.
     it's not 8 sectors a track, it's 9.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 22:38:19 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     the one annoying thing about doing this in an accurate emulator is that it's accurately emulating how slow the floppy drive is

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 22:58:44 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     so my current format seems to work, but it leads to the whole track being bad, apparently.
     sectors 02C7h through 02CF are bad.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 22:59:45 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I think that means I'm formatting the right track, but with the wrong sectors.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 23:00:19 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     BOY IT WOULD BE NICE IF I COULD OPEN THIS IN A FLUX VISUALIZER

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 23:01:35 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     save me foxflux:
     https://dbalsom.github.io/fluxfox/index.html

     HEY WHO STOLE MY WHOLE TRACK? WHERE ARE THE SECTORS?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 23:10:07 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     FUCK! I clobbered ES! my code assumed ES never got modified, but when I had to do all the set-interrupt stuff I had to clobber it myself

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 23:10:47 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I'm trying to format the disk with some RANDOM MEMORY as the sector numbers! no wonder it doesn't fucking work

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 23:12:30 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I'm amazed I didn't notice that in the debugger!

     OH WAIT I DON'T HAVE A DEBUGGER

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 23:18:35 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     There we go.
     Track 39, side B, and the sector numbers go 1,2,3,255,5,6,7,8,9.

     No sector 4, so it'll fail to be found. Which is what I want.

   • Phil M0OFX (philpem@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 23:22:51 JST Phil M0OFX

     in reply to

     @foone What software are you using for this? I don't think I've seen this one before - unless it's Applesauce, which I don't use very often.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 23:24:36 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Phil M0OFX

     @philpem FluxFox!
     https://github.com/dbalsom/fluxfox

     I'm using the web interface:
     https://dbalsom.github.io/fluxfox/index.html

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 23:25:45 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     And tested in DOS. It passes the copy protection!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 23:30:37 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay, so I've patched out the copy protection, easy.
     I've created the hacked disk, as 1.44mb, then created it again as the correct 720kb.

     BUT IT TURNS OUT THERE'S ONE MORE

     That "DAT4" file? It's actually supposed to be to let you install this game to a hard drive, and it works by building signature of what your computer looks like (or as well as it can in DOS), and comparing it to a file.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 23:31:11 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     It naturally encrypts the file. But it does it badly, so I can probably bypass it without too much trouble

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 23:31:53 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     this explains why all the copies online are incorrectly cracked: They zipped up their installation, which worked fine... on their machine.

     as soon as you run it on a different machine, it fails

   • Phil M0OFX (philpem@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 23:33:49 JST Phil M0OFX

     in reply to

     @foone OH DAAAAMN. This is wicked cool.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 23:39:06 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     if you install this game and then update your BIOS it will fail copy protection.
     if you install it and then upgrade to a VGA card, it'll fail.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 23:42:21 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     add more ram? another floppy drive?
     failed

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 23:45:25 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I'm surprised this game didn't come with a dongle

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 23:47:54 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     this game might seriously have some anti-cracking features that I just narrowly avoided?

     why is this game so protected?

     now I gotta try to trigger the anti-cracking

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 23:51:42 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     nah, it's not an anti-crack routine, it's just more PC-fingerprinting.

     nice try but all your nonsense boils down to one 16bit number and I can just copy out the correct result to stuff in the file

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 13-Feb-2025 23:59:31 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     DAT4 is 760 bytes, and how many are actually used?

     15. It only actually looks at 15 bytes of the fucking file

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 00:08:12 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • наб

     @nabijaczleweli YUP!

   • наб (nabijaczleweli@101010.pl)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 00:08:13 JST наб

     in reply to

     @foone is the rest of the file random uninitialised buffer contents, in time-honoured unix tradition?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 00:08:59 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay now I have a fake DAT4 that works.

     next step, make a utility to make my own DAT4 for any PC configuration.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 00:09:36 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     then I don't have to touch the EXE to crack it: I just write out the correct DAT4 signature, so the game thinks it's okay.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 00:11:37 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     step1: grab the 11 bytes starting at FFFF:0005, and XOR them with 57h. Write out 11 bytes
     step 2: call Get Equipment List (int 11), and OR the result with C1CD. Write out 2 bytes.
     step 3: a miracle happens, write out the result as 2 bytes.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 00:13:10 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     the step 3 is FUN_1000_c43a, a function that does a lot of weird math on some local data and segment registers and such. I don't understand it and I'm not sure I want to. I think I might just cheat and yoink it out of the EXE

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 00:23:05 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     hah! one of the things that changes the signature is if single step is set.

     So if you try to walk through the program with a traditional debugger, you'll change the signature just by debugging it

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 00:31:04 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     yeah this thing is trying to fingerprint what processor you have in the age before CPUID.

     and it's doing it by abusing the cpu flags, to try and figure out what CPU you're using.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 00:44:28 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay it returns a value in AH, AL.

     AL will be 00 for 8086/80186
     AL will be 02 for 286
     AL will be 03 for 386
     AL will be 04 for 486+

     AH is if you have an FPU. It'll be equal to AL, unless AL is 00, then it'll be 01.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 00:45:14 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     so, for example, a 486DX will be a 0404, a 386 with no FPU will be 0003

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 01:25:18 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     they definitely got this code from elsewhere, because it's partially pointless:
     whether or not there's an FPU in the system is ALREADY determined by the equipment list!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 01:42:33 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I think I found the source.
     It's based on official Intel code:
     INTEL RECOMMENDED CPU / MCP IDENTIFICATION CODE

     I found an ancient copy here: http://ftp.lanet.lv/ftp/mirror/x2ftp/msdos/programming/hardware/cpuid3.zip

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 01:46:02 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Found it through this code by R. Collins who fixed it to detect some systems more reliably:

     https://www.rcollins.org/ddj/Sep96/Sep96.html

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 01:51:52 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     "The infinity of the coprocessor must be checked to determine the correct coprocessor id."

     deep!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 02:48:55 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     this code can handle the situation where you have a 386 but with a 80287 FPU installed instead of the 80387 FPU.

     That's impressive!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 03:59:08 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     OKAY buildsig is working. I just need to write up some docs. I might leave that until tomorrow, but I'm uploading the new version now.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Friday, 14-Feb-2025 04:07:05 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     And done. For the first time in the nearly TWELVE YEARS this game has been uploaded on the archive, it works properly now:

     https://archive.org/details/bible-builder

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 15-Feb-2025 15:43:02 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     ok, the CD version came in.

     The game calls itself Version 1.02! (The earlier floppy edition had no version number displayed)

     They just took out the copy protection. Boring.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 15-Feb-2025 15:43:46 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     the only other change I've noticed is that they slightly rearranged the credits.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 15-Feb-2025 15:47:11 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     they may also have tweaked some command line argument parsing? I'm not sure, I haven't looked into that part of the floppy edition

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 17-Feb-2025 09:57:31 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I tested my funky-format on a real system now! It worked fine.
     You can see it here: This track (39, on side B) has the normal 9 sectors, but one of them has entirely the wrong sector number, it's 255 instead of 4.

     So when we make the DOS call to try and read sectors 0x2CA, it'll fail to find it, because that sector should be in this track, but isn't.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 17-Feb-2025 09:59:31 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I used a nine-track formatting with one clearly-wrong sector instead of just telling it to format only 8 sectors, because I wanted to make sure I was overwriting all previous sectors.
     This was easier (for Reasons) than hacking a flux stream to just have no sector there.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Monday, 17-Feb-2025 10:46:41 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I emailed the developer to see if he can answer some questions about how/why it worked, and to ask if he can get me an original floppy disk (image?)