Bad idea: build a captcha library that embeds DOSBox so it can make you beat levels/puzzles from DOS games to continue.
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I just realized this is a game. fuck, half this should be on TCRF. I do not have time for that right now
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well that sure is a fuck of a thing.
playing with the cheats and there's a pick-a-puzzle mode.
It looks like this.
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the funniest part? that's an image. like, in the game. they just screenshotted an image and wired up some basic clickables. It's not a real dialog!
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puzzle counts:
43 scales
40 electricity
33 energy
42 force
42 gear
20 jigsaw
30 "magnetizm"
20 simple machine -
I should automate this and dump screenshots of all 270 puzzles
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btw: at first glance, no evidence of cheats in the DOS version
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the documented cheats are missing at least one: ctrl-w
I have no idea what it does besides print "beam me up sid" in the corner.
it does SOMETHING, I just don't understand what yet.
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the producer was Sid Weber
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a linked list of fonts, indexed by number.
that's an interesting approach to font storage
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found another byte-level patch:
there's a debug-printf function which has a hack at the top to set the first character of the printf template to \0 -
the game's EnsureFontLoaded function seems to be called with 2 font numbers:
15000 and 200I'm sure that makes sense to someone
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okay and I can spot a chunk index I sorta understand inside FONTS.DAT which specifies 3 fonts: 200, 300, and 15000
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so it seems to identify chunks by a 4-digit character string (like NFNT) and a 16bit integer.
Very similar to what 3d Movie Maker does
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so I think what's going on is these weirdos abused the 16bit linker to build their DAT files
that's why they're all DLL/EXE files
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so it seems the NE files have multiple resource sections, and the first one has an index to get to the sub-chunk, and the rest are just in that order.
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I don't know if they wrote their own NE executable header parser or there's some weird API for it that they're using
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oh goody it emulates file numbers on top of the whole windows Handle thing.
so it's limited to 127 files open at once
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correction: 30 files
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okay yeah they're parsing their own EXE Files.
absolutely wild.
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Borland Turbo C++: I know compilers who merge constant strings and they're all cowards
