tandy put their sound chip on the 1A interrupt?

Foone🏳️‍⚧️

I'm gonna build an m.2 addon that's just a drop in x86 coprocessor. I know a lot of computers that could use an x86 processor these days.

Foone🏳️‍⚧️

it's like a Super Game Boy, but for your PC! Plug in this extra hardware, and now your system is compatible with a ton more software!

Foone🏳️‍⚧️

note to self: figure out how Ghidra fidb works, so I can apply it to MSC5.1 (which was sadly overlooked by the developers of ghidra)

Foone🏳️‍⚧️

note to self:
maybe do it for everything MS-DOS.

Tim 🎮

@foone por que no los MS-DOS?

Foone🏳️‍⚧️

okay don't change that byte, GOT IT.
I think I failed to load the cursor, which caused it to corrupt the mouse cursor catastrophically

Foone🏳️‍⚧️

a fun kind of reverse engineering tactic that I practice probably more than I should is a version of The Scream Test (which is the principle that the easiest way to find who "owns" a server is to turn it off and see who screams): if you don't know what some code does, break it. and see what screams.

Foone🏳️‍⚧️

I think I may have found unused graphics for a feature that'd change the Acme Detective Agency at the beginning to be season-specific. There's summer, fall, winter, and spring variants, but the game seems to be hardcoded to summer

Foone🏳️‍⚧️

no, this should be working. Hmm. Maybe they just missed one of the four images?

Foone🏳️‍⚧️

nope! it's fully functional, based on the system date.

tomasino

@foone hey, longshot here, but in your fun have you run across a "getting close" cutscene where the flower pot (in like in the window) drops and crashes on the ground. I think it's supposed to signify a near miss of hitting you.

I remember it vividly from playing as a kid, but I've since watched playthroughs and scoured screenshots and I'm doubting my own memory.

Foone🏳️‍⚧️

I did a little looking into the contents of MIDISND.DAT

It's got 12 small tracks, and each of them is a valid MIDI file if you remove the first byte.

Foone🏳️‍⚧️

@tomasino I've definitely seen that image, but I don't think it's in this version: There's only three "you're close" animations: A gun, a knife, and an axe.

Foone🏳️‍⚧️

heh. I was checking different near-death animations by overriding the randomness, so I had to tell my debugger to set AX to 0

guess which animation that is? The one with the AXe.

Foone🏳️‍⚧️

why do they store the day of the week as a 16bit int?

future proofing in case the calendar gets updated and has more than 256 days in the week?

Foone🏳️‍⚧️

I accidentally applied a patch backwards and put the detective to sleep, forever.
They're in Rome and they've just slept through about two months of nothing

Foone🏳️‍⚧️

patching 0x148C9 in the EXE to 90 90 will stop the clock advancing, so you now have Infinite Time to catch the culprit

Foone🏳️‍⚧️

I finally figured out how it calculates travel times.
It's the difference in X coordinate between the two cities, plus the difference between the Y coordinate, plus one.
that quantity divided by 40, then has 2 added. if the result is over 7, it's set to 7.

Weird! that's not how you measure distance, Carmen.

Foone🏳️‍⚧️

TODO: plot all the distances between all 30 cities and compare how inɐccurate this mess is

Foone🏳️‍⚧️

also, it's the 90s, I can afford a sqrt().
I should fix it up for my version.

or use a squared lookup table. you could do this REAL easy by making it a table search: there's only 6 possible results: 2,3,4,5,6,7. each entry in the lookup table contains the maximum squared distance that can generate that number of hours