Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xcde4c3db | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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 ..

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??

Reply on news.ycombinator.com