I don't know if I'm weird or if it's just normal to get random reverse engineering urges.
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@foone is this border why the sector maps are 14x14 instead of 16x16 like normal people would do?
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I went and bought the GOG version.
The one I was hacking on was version 1.0 from 1988, the gog one is 3.40 from 1989 -
the main difference is the addition of Access's RealSound tech which let them play PCM sound effects over a PC speaker
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@phlip that would make sense, but no. the maps are really 12x12 since there's a 1-sector wide empty border on each area
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annoyingly the map PDF gog provides is the one out of the pirated version.
I was kinda hoping they'd rescanned it, but no -
and this version of the EXE is compressed with SEA-AXE, which UNP apparently doesn't support? ugh.
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I found a version of Stick Buster that says it can extract SEA-AXE but it seems to contain any-piracy stuff that breaks on DOSBox. arg
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yep I found two different programs that can extract SEA-AXE and both of them just crash when I launch them in dosbox or virtualbox
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so I'm just gonna have to reverse engineer this EXE myself like some kind of caveman
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@foone Try 86box?
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@jernej__s didn't have it installed. guess I'll go try it now
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Foone🏳️⚧️replied to Foone🏳️⚧️ last edited by [email protected]
I have now tested 86box.
the unpacker crashes in exactly the same way -
went and found to other copies from other places, they both crash in the same way. weird.
Here's the link if anyone wants to take a crack at running it:
http://cd.textfiles.com/smmodem/ARCHIVE/SBUST24R.ZIP -
the program seems to do some kind of self-modifying code and then it ends up overwriting actual code with gibberish which obviously doesn't work
and we end up in an infinite loop of invalid instructions -
correction: the memory gets repeatedly overwritten before it ends up in the endless invalid-instruction loop.
I think it's trying to do some kind of unpackery nonsense but it breaks for god only knows what reason and it ends up uncompressing over itself
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wait this is shareware. did they timebomb this?
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no, unless they're getting tricksy with it.
Like, timebombed software sometimes doesn't just check the date: it checks if you're cheating at the date.
One easy way to do this is to look at what files you have on your drive. if there's a bunch from 2010, you are probably lying about it being 1994
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@foone technically my first game was "Dracula" for the C64 (although i only got to play it once since i didn't have a C64), but my real first game was Keen IV (shareware from the grocery store) for my Leading Edge 486.
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Foone🏳️⚧️replied to Cameron 💙🏳️⚧️🦌 last edited by [email protected]
@old_angry_queer Keen 4 was my third game! It would have been the second, but I couldn't get it working. I had to wait a couple months for my grandma to visit and use her DOS SKILLZ to figure it out for me
