tandy put their sound chip on the 1A interrupt?

[foone@digipres.club]

@jn nah nah, you just use malloc backwards so you don't need a free!

p=malloc(1234);
// do something with p
malloc(-p); // free p

[foone@digipres.club]

the way this game does the investigations is interesting.
so the basic gameplay is that you're in location X, you get 3 hints, which lead you to location Y, where the whole process repeats.

But if you savescum to experience the same pursuit again, they'll always go through the same places... but if you don't get the hints, they won't be there.

[foone@digipres.club]

like the hints will always tell you to go to sri lanka, but if you go there without first having heard those hints, then he won't be in sri lanka

[lumecolca@kolektiva.social]

@foone
How many of the hints do you need to trigger before they're actually there? This might explain some behavior I remember from long ago...

[foone@digipres.club]

@lumecolca just one will do.

[foone@digipres.club]

Hah! the game apparently calculates some info ahead of time, but only a few steps. I changed who the suspect was by memory editing, and it didn't take effect... until I got to the third location.

Since I went from a robbery by Fast Eddie B to one by Merey LaRoc, it means the pronouns changed when I got to London.

Congrats on coming out as a trans woman, Merey.

[foone@digipres.club]

ok I ran my dosspin tool to gibberish every byte of the save game file (it's only 102 bytes, so this is easy!) and none of them change where you start. very interesting... I'm guessing either the values are spread out too much for my gibberishing to reach, or you need to modify multiple bytes at once

[foone@digipres.club]

huh, I found a hidden(?) key: if you hold down either shift, it skips all the pauses in the printing. so it goes at MAX CPU SPEED

[foone@digipres.club]

ahh good. it's always fun to find code that looks like:
do{

while(variable!=0);

some one has a custom tick handler that's permutating a global!

[foone@digipres.club]

can't be threading, this is 16-bit DOS. There is no threading.

[re@fuzzies.wtf]

@foone enbies are allowed to commit any crimes they want, i support this /s /lh

[nil@furry.engineer]

@foone but there are interrupts

[foone@digipres.club]

@nil exactly!

[foone@digipres.club]

@re exactly. I can steal what I want!

[munin@infosec.exchange]

@foone

....yeah but what if you wrote your own TSR swap engine :3

[foone@digipres.club]

looking at interrupts, and I think I found a bug.
they set handlers for various CPU errors, but they accidentally set 10 (COPROCESSOR ERROR) twice, instead of the 05 (BOUND check)/10 (COPRPOCESSOR) interrupts they save

someone copy-pasted and missed a bit

[foone@digipres.club]

@munin THEN I DESERVE WHAT I GET

[foone@digipres.club]

I finally found the two helper functions they use to get and set vectors!

all the 30 other places I've seen them set/get vectors, they do it manually, but hey, maybe they use the helpers too

[foone@digipres.club]

could also be that this is a compiler-provided bit of code, which is left in because the runtime needs it, or they just didn't eliminate dead code

[foone@digipres.club]

okay I've figured out there's a shared format they're using here. it chunks the file into chunks, which have a 16-bit ID (unique per file, but not globally), an offset, and 16-bit length