Development content accidentally shipped on a DOS CD-ROM game from 1993 | Hacker News Reader

Development content accidentally shipped on a DOS CD-ROM game from 1993

github.com

385 pointsfortyseven198 comments

Imagine 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?

The leak appears to be mentioned here: http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/1997-fifa-partial-source...

But all the links are dead.

There's a MEGA link here that still works:

https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=369679&sid...

Indeed, that's exactly what I got.

I 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/

Just got in touch with Archive.org (by mail)!

Please, please get in touch with archive.org

Talk to @frankcifaldi and @textfiles (works for internet archive) on twitter

Done: https://twitter.com/franzbeaune/status/833922527999127552

[deleted]

There is no such thing as a video game that has accidentally fallen into the public domain. The entire field isn't old enough to outlast copyright expiry (currently 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation for collaborative works like video games usually are).

The only thing that can be said is that the owner may not be enforcing it anymore.

I suspect it might be theoretically possible for ancient computer games, of the SpaceWars or Adventure eras, to have lapsed into the public domain by omitting copyright notices or lapsing registrations.

This was possible before a change in copyright law in the US in 1988 when copyright became more or less automatic. The cutoff date was January 1st 1978, which does exclude most modern video games, and people didn't much care about copyright in video games, or software generally, prior to that date.

There are a few films made relatively recently - Night of the Living Dead being a prominent example - which are public domain through oversights in the handling of the film's copyright. Whether there are actually any video games that went public domain by this route is left as an exercise for the reader...

You lose copyright if you fail to put a notice on it? I thought that wasn't the case and you have copyright on something as soon as you create it.

Proving you have copyright can be another matter...

> You lose copyright if you fail to put a notice on it?

Only for pre-1978 things.

Kind of, Sort of.

A title change from Night Of The Flesh Eaters to Night Of The Living Dead caused all kinds of problems for Romero and Russo.

They finally "solved" the copyright problem with Night of the Living Dead by doing a new restoration, with a fresh digital transfer and some fixed audio. So they can claim copyright on that, just not the original material. I suspect it'll be released on blu-ray soon enough.

Here is the game in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQjT2qE4u98

And a partial file listing of the source code I got: http://imgur.com/F6XVLP0

> on a demos CD that shipped with a magazine!

You can submit an image of the CD to the Internet Archive, exactly the kind of stuff they're collecting: https://archive.org/details/cdbbsarchive

No accidental source code as far as I know, but if they're collecting magazine CDs in general I have a bunch of mid-90s cover CDs which I'd be happy to rip. (Sadly not the one coverdisc I'd really love to be reunited with, though it must be in my parents' attic somewhere...)

Is there a guide to the best way to rip the disc image, preferred formats for inlay scans, etc?

And do I need to do anything regarding copyright? I would definitely not want to cause any legal trouble for archive.org as it is a v valuable resource.

> Is there a guide to the best way to rip the disc image, preferred formats for inlay scans, etc?

Not sure there's any magic involved, I did this on Linux with dd if=/dev/cdrom of=file.iso. For scans I just did the highest resolution my scanner did.

Re copyright, I wouldn't be overly worried. I mean this stuff usually contains shareware, demos and other software that was supposed to be copied. The Internet archive will probably take it down if there's a legit complain, but given that mostly "nobody cares" it should be okay.

dd won't rip any hidden sessions or audio tracks. There was a fascinating patch for the 2.4 (2.2?) kernel that created a cdfs where mounting a CD gave a directory of all of the sessions and tracks, so you could recover earlier versions of files that were replaced by a later session on a multi-session disc. Not sure how to do that now.

Oh man, I have every PC Gamer Magazine and CD from the era where the binding imagine combined to spell PC Gamer. I was actually thinking of throwing them out, since they take up a lot of space at my parent's house and I don't really want them in mine.

At the very least, make (and test) an ISO of the CD image, since there was discussion recently about how CD media degrade after ~10-20 years.

It's been on my (successive) hard drives for the past 22 years :)

I 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.

It'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.

Bethesda (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.

Perhaps it's internal tooling/libraries? I wouldn't be surprised if derivatives of projects from back then were used in more recent games.

That'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.

One of the issues is that modern source control practices weren't really in play for 90s game development. The code for many Origin games, for instance, were stored on floppies that are long gone.

Nooooooooo. Strike Commander was the shit.

Man I loved that game. I think it was the first CD game I ever played, having gotten it on a compilation with Syndicate, Ultima 8 and Wing Commander 2, when my family got a Sound Blaster 16 in what...1993? Great games.

How could one release source code anonymously? I am asking for a friend. /s

This is a really good question.

We have wikileaks etc, but nothing to make it easy for digital preservation of things like this.

Perhaps for games a site like abandonia.com could setup a git server?

I bet there are a ton of people reading this page who have access to old code that if they deleted it, it would be gone forever.

Create a new user on github, `git push`.

Not a long-term solution, companies are entirely willing to DMCA Github repos.

A torrent?

IPFS, use a junker VPS you buy for a month. And share the IPFS link via Hacker News.

It should end up in enough caches to be self-replicating after an hour or 2.

- One or more burner MEGA.nz accounts

- Share via multiple of the many infamous "file sharing" sites - but pay close attention to the file size limits for free/anonymous downloads

- A torrent, seeded via VPS (as another user suggested). I haven't heard of people using UrDN for this specifically but I think that could be interesting.

- Share via DC++, use the chat system to tell everyone about the TTH at least 5 times within 2 days. (You could run a VPN between said VPS and your PC or use Xvnc/RDP and run DC++ directly from the VPS.)

- Find the underground community most closely related to the source code in question, or just general hacking forums, and share the link(s) there

- Carefully maintain your seed(s) (replacing dead links with new ones, etc) until the link(s) go solidly viral, then to be sure wait the same amount of time again. By this point you should have reached minimal saturation.

- Include SHA256sums of all the files on the website(s) you link to. Make a lot of noise about the checksums, particularly the checksum of the main archive (eg .7z) file. This will help minimize the number of people who try to latch onto/jump on top of your release and claim it as their own - they'll want to include their own message, which would alter the checksum. This is mainly for security, not vanity.

- If you ever think you want to provide updates, write a short message that describes yourself as the original source of this information, SHA512sum that string, and include the checksum in the release. You can then prove your authenticity by including the short message in the update; anybody can verify the SHA512.

- If you want to appeal to the warez scene or you think appealing to that demographic will help spread this, use the .rar format. It's not technically competitive anymore but scene groups traditionally continue to use it.

The best way would be to contact jason scott @textfiles and offer it to him. He works for the Internet Archive and can properly (and robustly) categorize and archive it.

Rather than attributing this to typical corporate behavior, I think there's a simpler explanation: the source code simply doesn't exist anymore. Source control wasn't especially distributed, pervasive, or reliable in the 90s (at least compared to modern standards). And it's unlikely that anyone official had the foresight to keep a copy around for the sake of digital preservation twenty years in the future, especially given the licensing/copyright issues that would probably prevent legal dissemination anyway. And even if a rogue developer had the foresight to take a copy home and stuff it in a box in the attic, that media has probably degraded to unreadability by now unless they've been actively backing it up for the past few decades.

Even if it hasn't degraded, or got meticulously backed up: Who wants to deal with the potential legal ramifications? For many now-defunct gaming shops, "who owns the assets" might be an interesting question for a JD thesis, but not something many people would like to spend time on.

That's the real issue. I'd be very surprised if much of the source code didn't still exist, but the entities owning it have been sold, bankrupted, chopped into pieces, and resold so often that it's impossible to legally release.

If it's so difficult to determine ownership, shouldn't it be easier to release? Throw it up on a free service somewhere and respond to DMCA takedowns in the rare event the owner shows up out of the woodwork.

I suppose one difficulty is that DOS games were released before the DMCA, or before the DMCA's process was clear. And the old system wasn't so forgiving.

> If it's so difficult to determine ownership, shouldn't it be easier to release? Throw it up on a free service somewhere and respond to DMCA takedowns in the rare event the owner shows up out of the woodwork.

You just described archive.org ;)

Actually, archive.org has a copyright exemption from the Library of Congress for certain stuff (of which I think this falls into). http://archive.org/about/dmca.php

How is the DMCA more forgiving than the original system?

Under the DMCA the hosting company is free from liability if they respond to takedown requests properly.

Prior to that their liability wasn't a clear legal question so there was alway lawsuit potential.

Archive.org could still end up in more trouble under the DMCA because lawyers could argue that there's a pattern of violations and it's not a neutral carrier.

> If it's so difficult to determine ownership, shouldn't it be easier to release?

No, because while it may be difficult for you to determine ownership, the actual owners may be well aware of their IP.

>Throw it up on a free service somewhere and respond to DMCA takedowns in the rare event the owner shows up out of the woodwork.

The DMCA protects the free service, it doesn't protect you.

The problem is asymmetry along two axes.

The first, information asymmetry. The person holding the code (the lone developer with an old floppy disk stored in the attic) has no idea who the owner might be. The actual owner is well aware of what they own.

That could be resolved by a DMCA takedown notice, yes.

Alas, there's usually also financial asymmetry. And as an individual, the potential costs of a copyright lawsuit are not something you want to face. As a larger company, it's just part of your normal expenses - especially if your business model is "accumulate IP"

To add to that, it would be quite a headache if source was found to have been copied from elsewhere (e.g., a developer copy & pasted code). Even if it was merely "similar looking code" independently developed, the risk of a lawsuit seems like it would not be worth it, especially given that there's not really much/any direct benefit for the publisher by publishing the code.

I have dozens of game CDs from that era and they're still playable.

Your CDs with the playable binaries were "pressed" in a factory with industrial equipment. The source was stored on the hard drives of ancient workstations and/or file servers and maybe a non-archival CD-R or a Zip/Jaz drive. Either way, the physical media were lost in an office move or layoff 3+ reorganizations ago. Some ex-employee probably has a copy in their garage, but good luck finding them.

Some of them were. Pretty much all my shareware titles were on CD-Rs because that's how my friends and I shared them.

IF you can find an old computer or emulator. Be happy CDs are still supported; there's a lot of formats that were "THE way to store stuff" and suddenly the reader hardware stopped production and most readers were thrown out.

And that's just the playable binary. If you want to, say, port it to iOS (no CD, wrong hardware, wrong OS) you'll need the actual source code - and the point of the OP is that source code is mostly lost, either being on unreadable media, unsupported obsolete data formats, or simply lost/discarded over time.

Having dozens of game CDs from that era doesn't mean you'll have anything that can read & run them (or will in the near future).

> Having dozens of game CDs from that era doesn't mean you'll have anything that can read & run them (or will in the near future).

For the past decade or so, DosBox has been a pretty much flawless option for emulation from Win/Mac/Linux: https://www.dosbox.com/information.php.

Before that Windows was pretty much able to emulate DOS environments on its own (for 80-90% of games). The great emulation options is one of the main reason, I've literally migrated my old data from hard drive to hard drive for 20 years. Some of my games were old even when I was a kid.

No, nonsense. Publishers keep everything, certainly the publishers I've worked for. Sierra is one of the oldies that, to my slightly out of date knowledge, still curates an archive of almost every asset for every game they've released. I'm certain the source for some of the earliest titles have been lost due to their hobbyist nature, but I've personally seen a raw list of the available archive that included games released from 1980 onward.

I'm happy to hear it, then. Do they also keep copies of the toolchains needed to build all of them? What is their storage infrastructure like, and what do they do to ensure it survives employee turnover and corporate reorganization?

I can't speak for Sierra as I don't know how they store their archive, but I've always found it interesting that some publishers (mostly music and movie really) use facilities such as this http://www.undergroundvaults.com/about-us/hutchinson/

This may be true of publisher in-house development teams, but I've seen and worked at third party studios that do little to nothing about post-release archival, a fact connected to having minimal IT controls and the end of a project often resulting in a massive layoff. Things get lost in the dust-up; dev kits get lent out from a publisher for one project and then aren't returned. The build server gets "reused". The same version control repo is used to ship two different games sharing the same engine. One coder stays behind after the rest of the team has been let go or moved to something else, in order to fix bugs, so he's the only one with the most up-to-date build. What is left over is a mishmash of project artifacts but no guarantee that "project K at point in time T" can be reconstructed in full.

And with some of those Sierra projects, their archival might have all the assets they could find; that doesn't mean they have all the assets.

Sierra only had a hand full of devs who worked in-house.

Counter to this; I work at one of the biggest game publishers in the world, and the assets and source for one of it's most famous games from the mid-90s simply doesn't exist anymore.

Rayman?

Edit: Hmmm... You probably should neither confirm nor deny.

I'm not going to say it doesn't happen, discs always seemed to get lost under piles of paper and eventually wind up sitting in a drawer somewhere, only to be thrown out when that persons office is vacated.

Oh how do i WANT to get my hands on that Caesar III source code now. This game was so incredibly fantastic, it just needed some bug fixes. And if someone were to start developing DLCs for it (think Paradox), I'd be all over that…

To me, that would be the main reason to release old source code. Though I understand the legal stuff is hairy, and people don't generally do it for that reason.

>And if someone were to start developing DLCs for it (think Paradox)

So, extra portraits and some background music? That will be 10$ please.

I personally know of games well into the late 90's where all or parts of the source code has been lost by the very major recognizable companies who built them. AAA titles even at the time.

A few of these games have been re-released later, and in some of those cases old engineers had to be tracked down who still had the source code laying around in their personal archives.

I imagine this is very common, considering some of the titles I've witnessed this happen to. If games will those types of budgets and followings were lost, I can't imagine the vast long-tail of the industry being any better. Plus there were far more independent studios at the time who later "made it big" only to flame out. I expect the vast majority of content created during this timeframe is permanently lost.

These days with the advance of business types understanding the long-term value of IP, I expect this is much better controlled by whomever is underwriting the cost of development. I believe this likely to be a bad thing - as you'll see more lawsuits over old games in the future.

It's a good idea not to just keep a copy of the source code stashed away somewhere, but also any contracts relating to the rights to the code.

In the early 90's, DUX Software licensed the rights to port SimCity to Unix from Maxis. Then DUX made a contract with me to do the work. I kept a copy of my contract with DUX, the original floppies they gave me with the original PC and Mac source code, as well as versions of the source code I ported to Unix.

Years later I got a job working for Maxis on The Sims. Before we shipped it, EA bought Maxis, so a lot of people were let go, projects were canceled, physical and digital files were shuffled around, and institutional knowledge was lost.

After we shipped The Sims but just before I left EA, on a fluke, I asked a Maxis old-timer if he had any idea if the contract between Maxis and DUX for SimCity still existed, and where it might be.

As you would expect, it was in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard." ;(

So I waited late into the night for the leopard to fall asleep, made a photocopy of it, then returned the original to its hiding place. ;)

Several years later, John Gilmore suggested we persuade EA to relicense the SimCity source code under GPLv3, so it could be shipped with the OLPC.

Of course nobody in EA Management knew where the source code was or if it even still existed, but fortunately I still had my copy.

And of course nobody at EA Legal even knew if EA owned the rights to the changes I'd made (Maxis had gotten into some pretty terrible SimCity licensing contracts in the past).

But fortunately I'd kept a copy of the contract between myself and DUX, and the contract between DUX and Maxis, proving its provenance, which clearly stated that DUX's rights expired after 10 years, after which the rights to all the modifications I made went back to Maxis (and thus were inherited by EA).

Once all that was cleared up, the most important factor was that EA deputized someone on the inside to shepherd the project through the various stages of approval, relicensing, development and QA. Otherwise it would have died on the vine, since everybody in a big company, no matter how well intentioned, is always 500% busy doing their own stuff and can't be distracted by something that doesn't affect the bottom line.

It finally made it through both EA Legal and QA, and we released the SimCity source code and binary for the OLPC under GPLv3!

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/micropol...

Really cool, thanks! I played SimCity a fair bit as a kid, it's really fun to look through s_disast.c in that repo... brings back some memories :P

You're welcome, and thanks for checking out the code!

Since releasing the X11/TCL/Tk version for OLPC, we've stripped out the user interface, cleaned up and refactored and doxygenated the city simulator engine code into C++, and wrapped it with SWIG so it plugs into Python and other scripting languages. It's not as "authentic", but it has more comments and is easier to read than the old C code:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/Micropol...

Here's a talk about it:

HAR 2009 Lightning Talk Transcript: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity, by Don Hopkins

http://micropolisonline.com/static/documentation/HAR2009Tran...

I got hooked on computer games by playing Zork at MIT-DM, and it really blew my mind to finally be able to read the original Zork source code in MDL. Reading the source code takes you backstage behind the scenes of a world you visited years ago, like the Disney's Keys to the Kingdom Tour!

https://github.com/itafroma/zork-mdl

The work you've done here is great.... You worked hard but no doubt brought a smile to many now happy children. I don't think my thanks is enough but it's a start. Keep on doing the good work you did with this and the world might get a bit brighter.

this was awesome. were your floppies still readable ? how ?

Floppies and VHS are more resilient that the people think. I have floppies from early of 90's that can be read/write without any issue. I have yet Dune game on two floppy disk, and many shareware, free and pirated games from these time. A few years ago, I did a backup of these floppies with a 3" 1/2 unit that I have.

I'd say most people are more familiar with late low quality media, which means plenty of unreadable disks from the 00s while most stuff from the early 90s might work fine (if stored properly)

That is absolutely fantastic. :)

it was in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard."

I see what you did there.

Unfortunately my comprehension only got as far as "that is a really really nice use of words."

Can I have a hint?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The plans specifying that Arthur Dent's home is to be torn down for building a highway bypass are on public display in such a disused lavatory.

Oh. Thank you so much. :)

I saw the movie, I think I really need to get the book...

The movie was a brief summary, and about 60% all-new content.

I recorded H2G2 off the radio as a teen, and listened to it so many times I could have quoted the entire 6 hours in one shot.

Me too, on cassette tapes, off the local college radio station WMUC!

I didn't mean to plagiarize -- those words are just so deeply embedded in my mind from listening to the radio shows and records, reading the books and playing the infocom game so many times, and they so perfectly described the situation. So I assumed everyone would recognize Douglas Adam's really really nice use of words, like a Shakespearian quote. ;)

"It's unpleasantly like being drunk."

"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"

"You ask a glass of water."

If you haven't already listened to the 1978 radio show millions of times, it's on youtube!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaV8XOYviB4&list=PL5nE2JSEwP...

Get the book, yes, but do get the original BBC radio play. That's where it started, and it's excellent.

Seconded. The radio play is great.

this is why nintendo resorted to emulation and community dumped roms for it's classic nes console. they simply don't have the code (although they could have bought the dumping hardware and used cartridges they had in a vault.)

The 'code' probably is just assembler instructions. You can't create a game on a limited system like the NES in C#. It has only 2k of memory, so you have to do everything yourself.

There is no way to port such a game with it feeling authentic, other than the emulator.

that's true, code is just what's in the programmer's head and the fingers are the compiler for that kind of machine.

This isn't exactly true. Games from as early as the Amiga era were known to have been ported by interpreting the gameplay code from the lead release platform(typically, an 8-bit computer or the Atari ST which in its early years put up good competition for the computer gaming crown) and rewriting the I/O-sensitive stuff. These were not considered great conversions at the time since the result was often sluggish and couldn't make proper use of the available hardware, often just looking like the original but with a different palette and worse sound, but they got the job done very quickly and accurately.

I have old source that is simply inaccessible. Quarter inch tape reels. 8" floppies. Even paper tape! So it may be around, but nobody on earth can read it.

If it's of historical significance or interest, I know folks who might be able to help you with that. Email's in my profile.

Not really - mag tape is old source to an early PC (pre-IBM-PC) operating system I used to work on. And the paper tape is compressed using a utility my friend wrote, and I forget how it works.

But thanks!

Can we have more details about the early PC os?

CTOS, or Convergent Technologies' Operating System, x86. It was a message-based client-server OS that was popular because it allowed diskless workstations hooked to a server. Shared disk, network, printers etc. Much more capable that DOS. Ran in a 1MB machine (they used to have those!) No special network cards - networking was built in. And no system administrator needed. Popular with govt buyers who calculated total cost of ownership for the whole system.

Convergent manufactured their own line of desktop computers. Initially marketed as 'scientific', they quickly found that enterprise was where the money was. So we built a whole office suite, Document Designer, editors, print engine, a Multiplan port (pre-Excel) from a goofy guy at a company called Microsoft.

Enjoy!

https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10

Jordan Mechner released the source of the 1989 Prince of Persia. https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II

"Code review" http://www.fabiensanglard.net/prince_of_persia/index.php

How it was saved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnEWBtCnFs8

I'm sure there was an article about it on ascii.textfiles.com but I can't find it.

One such game is Jagged Alliance 2. See here: https://github.com/dariusk/ja2

Some fine folks have also made a version that works on modern computers: https://github.com/ja2-stracciatella/ja2-stracciatella

The Freespace developers released the source code to Freespace 2 (a game from 1999) in 2002 when they were bought by another studio. That game has since become the gold standard (imo) of space flight simulators and the engine and graphics have been improved every since as Freespace Open so it still to this day feels like a AAA title. http://scp.indiegames.us/

id Software does this: https://github.com/id-Software

Sort 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.

I 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.

I 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

Ooh. Is that available anywhere??

You can find many examples of this on TCRF:

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.

It 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 ..

> 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/devel...

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinagraham

[3] https://github.com/Fortyseven/RA_1993/blob/master/UTIL/X.BAT...

Cool find over there, let's see if he will come for this topic here =)

It'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!

I 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.

Ah 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

I 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.

This seems awfully familiar to me as well, but I can't be sure.

Quite 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.

As 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

>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)

I don't know. I'd guess either the practical 2A.BAT or the clever NOT2B.BAT

Both, actually: scripting by mood :-D

2B.BAT or NOT2B.BAT, that is the question.

Shakespeare was definitely ahead of his time when he wrote the now-immortal words: "To B: or to A:, that is the question."

While I find the content itself to be fascinating, I'd love even more to hear the tale of HOW this happened. :)

I 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_L...

I owned this game as a kid and still have the CD; if only I had bothered to explore the disk!

We 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.

I 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!

My 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...

That'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.

I 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.

hahaha! Me too. I loved the video where they animated Darth Vader and an imperial officer like puppets.

I randomly had this cd across from my desk when I read this article, so I decided to pop it in and see if I could find anything. Did a dd | strings but so far can't find any of these tools, unless they are outside the data track.

Mine says "Rebel Assault PC-CDROM V1.7" so maybe there are different versions of the cd with and without the dev files.

Nah, the directories are off the root in \ALIASES and \UTIL along side the actual game and demo content (e.g. "\SAMDEMO", "\LVL10", etc.)

Did some poking around and found a reference to my copy being "REBEL ASSAULT 1.2". I'll have to note that someplace.

Is this the first time these utilities (particularly DK.EXE) have ever been seen in public?

There 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.c...

This is amazing. It looks like this is the first time some of these tools have seen the light of day outside LA. Wow.

Has/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.

Even if they are infected it would be with an ancient DOS virus. I guess it could infect your DOSBox install?

Just to echo some other sentiments, please put this on archive.org for long term preservation.

Awesome, 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

I 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/

That 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.

yeah 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.

Aye, that's fair. I figured GitHub would just be a first step -- I just started archiving all this today.

Ooh. What other things have you got tucked away? :)

I'm very interested to see what comes next too! Please do post about any future uploads to HN.

(Psst. I got this, not OP. One level up. Don't worry, I've made the same misteak.)

It's a rare misteak

Rare, steak, get it? Nevermind

...Yup. :)

chuck it in the blockchain

Isn't this a GitHub TOS violation.

If 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.

I'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)

Aye, that's actually my next step. :) (Archive.org, that is.)

I 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.

Disc image and photo if possible - they're librarians, remember.

The 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!

You'd need to contact Disney. They own the IP now.

I thought LucasArts still owned the IP, but Disney owned LucasArts?

LucasArts still owns the IP, Disney is just its parent company now. LucasArts is the licensor, so I'd still recommend contacting them.

It is Disney today. They own and decide.

IIRC, Disney shut down the game division when they acquired LucasFilm, so you would have to talk to someone at the parent co (Disney). Disney has a lot of old IP that's still very valuable, so they guard it aggressively[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Willie#Copyright_sta...

Technically, neither Disney or LucasArts own DeluxePaint.

Who owns it?

Edit: Looks like EA owns it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint#Legacy

For Deluxe Paint you will probably have to ask Electronic Arts.

At the time, these files were worth six billion dollars.

Disney paid $4.05B in 2012 for all of Lucasfilm, I don't think at any point in particular these files specifically were worth $6B.

I read that as sarcastic and very funny. Upvoted.

How so?

Several points someone might have a problem with: - This is content that shipped on a commercial product - It contains proprietary LucasArts content, including a development tool - It also includes minimal copies of Deluxe Paint 2 (whoops!)

I looked past all of this considering the age of it, but I won't fault GitHub for yanking it. I'll host it elsewhere if that happens.

Makes sense, thank you for the explanation.

Technically yes. Technically it's infringing copyright. The important question, however, is whether this is old enough that nobody cares anyone. I would wager that it falls on the side of not raising any flags anywhere, even though at one point this was valuable IP.

Yep, I don't think it's going to last very long there

At the risk of sounding crass, who cares? If LucasArts cares, they'll send a DMCA to GitHub. Software from 1993 isn't depriving them of any profit and it's being shared for educational reasons. (it's not even the game itself) Preemptively freaking out over copyright is exactly what the MPAA wants you to do: they want you to forget that it's your right to share things. This has a chilling effect that we should avoid lest we enter a cultural black hole where we can only confidently share anything published before 1923.

This is why I wish copyright would expire after 15 years or so instead of forever. Especially for software. Very, very few people are profiting from 15 year old software.

If there were a mechanism whereby it could be extended for a fee, profitable 15yo+ software would still be protected but the community would benefit from everything else.

15 year old software, like Windows XP and MS Office XP?

Yes. Both are abandoned by microsoft — if they weren't protected anymore, people could add their own patches and fixes and distribute them.

People already create and distribute patches for Windows releases: release binary diffs (e.g. "patcher" programs) - which has the added advantage of being much smaller and easier to distribute - and that doesn't even mean you need to violate copyright law anyway.

Apparently I'm one of those people. I'm still earning money from Photoshop plugins I first wrote around 2001 / 2002. And the DOS version of Rebel Assault mentioned in this post is still sold through Good Old Games, 20+ years later (though presumably without the accidental copy of Deluxe Paint):

https://www.gog.com/game/star_wars_rebel_assault_1_2

Software products can have a surprisingly long life. (Which can also mean a surprisingly long time of providing customer support, too.)

Of course there are exceptions. But for every piece of software that's still making money 15 years later, there's 99 pieces that are totally abandoned. Often it's difficult to even figure out who owns the rights and how to contact them.

Even the works that are still generating revenue after 15 years, surely most of them have already made 99% of the money they are ever going to make. The people buying rebel assault now are just a few nostalgia seekers. It will add up to a tiny tiny fraction of the total copies sold in it's heyday.

> Very, very few people are profiting from 15 year old software.

Except the ones (for example Nintendo) who do have a lot of cash, influence groups and lawyers to enforce their rights as long as they want.

Related 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

Note: Despite what this image shows, the text encoding is actually SHIFT-JIS.

Pretty 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?)

Found an old PC Magazine article talking about it: https://goo.gl/cZ1R3M

I had DP2 and DP2e; IIRC the "enhanced" included svga drivers. (without those you were limited to 320x200x256 or 640x480x16)

Deluxe Paint was an amazing tool! I spent so many hours on that tool doing animations and paintings. I wonder what happened to that company?

EA 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.

Also, grafx2 is very heavily DP-inspired: http://pulkomandy.tk/projects/GrafX2

Great for pixelling.

It was published by Electronic Arts, who are doing quite well :)

yeah 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.

in other news, the source for killer7 is no longer available here, lol:

http://interone.co.jp/interone_games25/killer7/

We had the source for it? Damn! I hope someone archived it! That game was a masterpiece.

I 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.

All those tools brought back some pleasant memories! Thanks for sharing.

Do 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.

I hated this game, probably still have the CD somewhere

Loved Rebel Assault! Thanks for posting.

It's part of the current Humble Bundle, if you're interested in replaying it.

A friend of mine once found a Windows 98 copy on an 'empty' still wrapped CD-R.

I wonder if this still runs on Windows 10?

Please edit title to replace "it's" with "its".

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