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Development content accidentally shipped on a DOS CD-ROM game from 1993
- rootw0rm 10y agoI hated this game, probably still have the CD somewhere
- chjj 10y agoI love stuff like this. Some source code was shipped with the Ultima Online Demo in 1998. It was encrypted, but a few private UO server hackers cracked it and reverse engineered their internal scripting language. Really interesting stuff: http://uodemo.uo98.org/ http://uodemo.uo98.org/
- rootw0rm 10y agoThat demo is extremely interesting. I was active on the old UO Demo forum. I reversed tons of UO clients and created patching tools that worked on hundreds of client versions from T2A onward.
- kutkloon7 10y agoQuite funny how times have changed. I think these development programs could be written in a few afternoons these days. Of course, most implementations would be 2+MB and require several frameworks.
- i336_ 10y agoIs this the first time these utilities (particularly DK.EXE) have ever been seen in public?
- fortyseven 10y agoThere was a reference to it among a handful of SCUMM documents released last year. The site is down at the moment, but Wayback Machine had some backups: http://web.archive.org/web/20160412081654/http://wilmunder.com/Arics_World/Games_files/The%20SCUMM%20Manual%20-%20Glossary.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20160412081654/http://wilmunder.c...
- i336_ 10y agoThis is amazing. It looks like this is the first time some of these tools have seen the light of day outside LA. Wow.
- kevin_thibedeau 10y agoIsn't this a GitHub TOS violation.
- fortyseven 10y agoIf it turns out it is, I'll remove the infringing content. But considering the age and circumstances, I'm giving it a shot for now.
- JonRB 10y agoI'd recommend possibly sticking it on archive.org - I've seen other old software on there. Either that or reach out to lucasarts and ask if it's okay, I suppose. (As long as you get it in writing)
- fortyseven 10y agoAye, that's actually my next step. :) (Archive.org, that is.)
- sildur 10y agoI went through all the links, clicking on them and asking archive.org to save a copy. I also did it with the "Download", "Raw", and "Download ZIP" links.
- voltagex_ 10y agoDisc image and photo if possible - they're librarians, remember.
- fortyseven 10y agoThe disc is deeply worn, so a full ISO is probably not going to happen -- though I'll try a bunch of stuff. Maybe I'll get lucky!
- shinymark 10y ago
- samplatt 10y ago>UTIL/2B.BAT Copies files to the B: drive Aw, man. I thought I was so original. (guess what I named copy copy-files-to-A:-drive)
- KevinEldon 10y agoI don't know. I'd guess either the practical 2A.BAT or the clever NOT2B.BAT
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- erickhill 10y agoPretty sweet to have Deluxe Paint 2 on there. I wonder what "Enhanced" meant? (Almost what you could get on an Amiga using version 3 or 4?)
- fortyseven 10y agoFound an old PC Magazine article talking about it: https://goo.gl/cZ1R3M https://goo.gl/cZ1R3M
- aidenn0 10y agoI had DP2 and DP2e; IIRC the "enhanced" included svga drivers. (without those you were limited to 320x200x256 or 640x480x16)
- fortyseven 10y agoWhile I find the content itself to be fascinating, I'd love even more to hear the tale of HOW this happened. :)
- dleslie 10y agoI owned this game as a kid and still have the CD; if only I had bothered to explore the disk!
- lebanon_tn 10y agoWe didn't have Internet for the longest time. "Browsing the web" for me meant browsing random parts of the file system and trying to figure out how it all worked. One time I broke my mom's work computer by renaming the Windows (95 or earlier) system folder to be my name. She had to lug a desktop back to work on the bus so they could fix it. Sorry mom.
- el_benhameen 10y agoI caused a similar problem trying to replace the Windows 98 boot screen with a picture of a Borg cube. But it made for a fun afternoon of frantic troubleshooting!
- NKCSS 10y agoMy mom tought me how to 'manage' my own floppy disk... Too bad I mixed up A and C while formatting... back then, nobody knew how to install an OS; machine was declared 'bricked' and when on the attick... it was 6 years before another PC entered our household...
- cube00 10y agoThat's rough, I remember when I thought I broke our PC when I was young (turns it was just a bad VGA cable) but I couldn't imagine what it would have been like to lose it after having had access to it... books, TV, even my NES were nothing compared to the things I could do on my PC.
- coroxout 10y agoI used to go through all the folders on my magazine cover CDs looking for interesting stuff - mostly game assets in formats I knew how to play with outside the game, like MOD files, sound files, images, but I found a file of emails to/from one of the contributors one time. (Sorry to that person for reading their private email! I was a very bored 15y/o and it was buried treasure to me.) Also I loved to load executable files into a hex editor and look for readable symbols among the stuff that was beyond my understanding. There was a bug in my hex viewer, though, where you could scroll off the end of the file and it would hexdump the next block on disk or memory locations beyond the loaded file instead. So I got very confused/paranoid viewing what I thought was the file from one game and seeing messages from another game or some of my own personal information.
- Alupis 10y ago> NET USE C: \\JUSTIN_GRAHAM\DRVC This must be the one and only, Justin Graham [1][2]. Congrats on your move to Unity in January btw! [1] http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/by_genre/developerId,1145/ http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/by_genre/devel... [2] https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinagraham https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinagraham [3] https://github.com/Fortyseven/RA_1993/blob/master/UTIL/X.BAT#L11 https://github.com/Fortyseven/RA_1993/blob/master/UTIL/X.BAT...
- forvelin 10y agoCool find over there, let's see if he will come for this topic here =)
- elastic_church 10y agoyeah I'm just going to clone and download that because github is a horrible place for "historic preservation". Copyrights can be extended forever for all practical purposes.
- fortyseven 10y agoAye, that's fair. I figured GitHub would just be a first step -- I just started archiving all this today.
- JabavuAdams 10y agoPlease edit title to replace "it's" with "its".
- bane 10y agoJust to echo some other sentiments, please put this on archive.org for long term preservation.
- 0xcde4c3db 10y agoSort of related: I don't remember specific examples, but I recall that several games/apps have inadvertently shipped with partial source code recoverable by an undelete tool because the developers simply deleted the source/build files from the floppy that they were using for development before imaging it for production, rather than wiping a new disk and copying only the release files.
- rasz_pl 10y agoI only recall OSes. DOS SDK with email dump captured in empty space of full disk image and not completely deleted scraps of source code for Amiga Kickstart shipped on 1.0 disk.
- 0xcde4c3db 10y agoI found a reference to source code recovered from the DOS port of Double Dragon II: The Revenge [1]. I could have sworn that I heard this story about some well-liked Amiga or Atari ST game, though. [1] https://archive.org/details/DRAGONII https://archive.org/details/DRAGONII
- i336_ 10y agoOoh. Is that available anywhere??
- buzzybee 10y agoYou can find many examples of this on TCRF: https://tcrf.net/Category:Games_with_uncompiled_source_code https://tcrf.net/Category:Games_with_uncompiled_source_code It tends to be an artifact of the build process, yes. Sometimes it vacuums up other random files like the developer's porn stash.
- mmjaa 10y agoIt used to be that sources for games were required - else you couldn't run them! :) I cut my teeth on cracking stuff in the 8-bit era by writing an assembly-language "OLD" command for my platform back then (Oric-1/Atmos) that would undo the work done by the "NEW" command - i.e. replace a sentinel byte - so that I could get full sources for games that 'protected' themselves by doing a "NEW" command whenever CTRL-C was pressed. So many wonderful discoveries came to me that way ..
- gravypod 10y agoI really wish game companies would publish their old source for really out of date games. I really wish I could see what went into making the games I love like Fallout 1/2.
- andrewstuart2 10y agoIt's not like they'd lose sales either. Depending on the game I'll bet it's pretty hard or even impossible to compile the source into a working game. I'd much rather pay the $5 it's going for on Steam than spend 8 hours playing with compiler settings, library versions, etc. Not even close to worth my time, but exploring the code on the other hand would be really interesting.
- kibwen 10y agoBethesda (maker of the Elder Scrolls games) provides binaries of the first two games in the series, Arena and Daggerfall, for free on their website (you need to find a DOS emulator to actually run them, they recommend DOSBox). It's not quite the source, but it's enough to suggest to me that financial concerns aren't the reason they don't release the source for these old games.
- cderwin 10y agoPerhaps it's internal tooling/libraries? I wouldn't be surprised if derivatives of projects from back then were used in more recent games.
- gravypod 10y agoThat's almost definetly it. Tim Cain, the "original" developer of Fallout, talked about a lot of the features of the engine. These are things that are either in use now in the GameByro engine, currently used by The Artist Known as Black Isles, or would be valuable to current day game developers.
- stephancoral 10y ago
- mech4bg 10y agoI remember finding this on the CD as a kid and being blown away - I couldn't understand why all this stuff had been included. Most of it was over my head, but I played around with Deluxe Paint for ages. Would love to know the backstory on this.
- feld 10y agoThis seems awfully familiar to me as well, but I can't be sure.
- mrmrcoleman 10y agoAll those tools brought back some pleasant memories! Thanks for sharing.
- firefoxd 10y agoAh i have this disc right here.[1] 25 years and it Still works. I will start looking at the files. Loom is an excellent game by the way. [1]:http://i.imgur.com/7YUXGnf.jpg http://i.imgur.com/7YUXGnf.jpg
- franzb 10y agoImagine my surprise when I came across the full C++ source code of UEFA Soccer 96 for DOS on a demos CD that shipped with a magazine! I never saw that leak mentioned anywhere. I think I still have the code. Should I share it, and how?
- franzb 10y agoThe leak appears to be mentioned here: http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/1997-fifa-partial-source-code-leak.55863/ http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/1997-fifa-partial-source... But all the links are dead.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- joshschreuder 10y agoI would share it with Archive.org for preservation. Not 100% sure how to do so, sorry, but here might be a good start: https://archive.org/create/ https://archive.org/create/
- franzb 10y agoJust got in touch with Archive.org (by mail)!
- voltagex_ 10y agoPlease, please get in touch with archive.org
- rootw0rm 10y agoin other news, the source for killer7 is no longer available here, lol: http://interone.co.jp/interone_games25/killer7/ http://interone.co.jp/interone_games25/killer7/
- AdmiralAsshat 10y agoWe had the source for it? Damn! I hope someone archived it! That game was a masterpiece.
- rootw0rm 10y agoI mirrored the whole site some weeks back with a recursive wget, the source is in there. I can post it up, not sure how big it will be, but there were quite a few assets.
- flukus 10y agoHas/can anyone verified that these tools are safe? We just had a false positive from our virus checker on our internal software prompting me to go search checksums etc (not easy when you software is as dated as ours) so I've been thinking about this, we are the perfect delivery vehicle for malware. Because this was an internal product our response was to white list the file, but the whole dev and support teams were too eager to jump to do that before even thinking to verify the dll in question was legitimate. If a nefarious person every had enough access to our machines to modify these binaries then it would go out company wide.
- jandrese 10y agoEven if they are infected it would be with an ancient DOS virus. I guess it could infect your DOSBox install?
- jeffwilcox 10y agoLoved Rebel Assault! Thanks for posting.
- teamonkey 10y agoIt's part of the current Humble Bundle, if you're interested in replaying it.
- astannard 10y agoDeluxe Paint was an amazing tool! I spent so many hours on that tool doing animations and paintings. I wonder what happened to that company?
- robert_tweed 10y agoEA never really kept up the PC version for some reason. I actually used it until around 2001 for all my web artwork (along with a DOS file conversion tool whose name escapes me). I have a friend who's a very oldschool pixel-artist. He still has an old DOS system purely because he's got so much work in dpaint and can't get it running on anything else. There is a spritual successor of sorts, called Cosmigo Pro Motion. I haven't tried it yet (although I picked up a copy in a Humble dev bundle a while ago). I hear it's the closest thing to dpaint for a pixel-oriented workflow, but with more modern Photoshop-like features, as well as dpaint features from the later Amiga versions that never made it to PC.
- tokenrove 10y agoAlso, grafx2 is very heavily DP-inspired: http://pulkomandy.tk/projects/GrafX2 http://pulkomandy.tk/projects/GrafX2 Great for pixelling.
- garethsprice 10y agoIt was published by Electronic Arts, who are doing quite well :)
- astannard 10y agoyeah I went onto wikipedia after I typed that. I guess photoshop took over. I only used the amiga version, I seem to recall seeing all this extra stuff on the game disk but never really used it.
- weavie 10y agoI wonder if this still runs on Windows 10?
- discordianfish 10y agoA friend of mine once found a Windows 98 copy on an 'empty' still wrapped CD-R.
- digi_owl 10y agoDo not recall ever making such a find. But once i picked up a demo cd that seemed to hold a demo of Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance that seemed to be fully functional on the strategic level.
- beeswax 10y agoAwesome, thanks for sharing! Took me right back there. I was soo happy to have that 2X CD drive and a 486DX to be able to play this game. Back then we were implementing our own bitmap drawing apps (simply called a PROGRAM back then) in Turbo Pascal (bgi256 ftw). We would challenge each other to come up with faster flood fill algorithms or smaller image file formats. Good ol' times
- manaskarekar 10y agoAs an aside, for those that may not be aware, id Software has source code for some big games on github. https://github.com/id-Software https://github.com/id-Software
- gobusto 10y agoRelated story: I put the game disc for the PS2 game "BCV: Battle Construction Vehicles" into my PC last year to see if there was anything interesting on it, and found several .h and .a files in a subdirectory: https://s17.postimg.org/itph8rsnz/agatha.png https://s17.postimg.org/itph8rsnz/agatha.png Note: Despite what this image shows, the text encoding is actually SHIFT-JIS.
- fortyseven 10y agoI was afraid I wouldn't be able to make an ISO of the disc, because it's so damaged... HOWEVER, it turns out someone ALREADY backed up v1.2 of this disc to archive.org back in 2013. :) https://archive.org/details/Star_Wars_-_Rebel_Assault_1993_LucasArts_ https://archive.org/details/Star_Wars_-_Rebel_Assault_1993_L...
- Keyframe 10y agoIt's been a lot of years, so my memory is vague, but on Wipeout (one of early ones, probably the first one) either on PSX disc or PC one (more probably the PC one). Psygnosis shipped norton commander makefile (equivalent) shortcuts and random dev stuff on it. I regularly poked around game distributions like that as a kid to see if there's anything of interest. I think that was the only jackpot I came around. Poor jackpot, but exciting!
- untog 10y agoI remember poking around the resources of Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun back when it came out, and found sprites for a load of units that never made it into the game. IIRC, they were actual tanks rather than the weird mech units that where in the final (and IMO, disappointing) version. Fun to think about the game that could have been.