1995 DOS game opensourced, needs hacker love | Hacker News Reader

1995 DOS game opensourced, needs hacker love

github.com

63 pointsLaPingvino13 comments

Just had to have a look, love the following tidbit from FILE.C

    char cryptkey[]={'M'-4,'i'-8,'n'-12,'d'-16,'y'-20,0};

    LONG Encrypt(char far *data,char *key)
    {
      LONG i=0,keypos=0;

      while(data[i]!=0){
        data[i++]^=key[keypos++];
        if(key[keypos]==0) keypos=0;
      }
      return i;
    }

Coupled with the following quote from the preface of Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography

"The simple-XOR algorithm is really an embarrassment; it’s nothing more than a Vigenère polyalphabetic cipher. It’s here only because of its prevalence in commercial software packages, at least those in the MS-DOS and Macintosh worlds [1502,1387]."

>because of its prevalence in commercial software packages, at least those in the MS-DOS and Macintosh worlds

Wonder why.

I wonder who Mindy is :-)

But if I switched "Mindy" to some other girl's name, would you know how to break it? :)

Biggest question for me: is someone motivated enough to fork it and lead further development? Or should I create a mailing list and ask people to join there?

You might want to look at how some successful similar projects did this, such as The Ur-Quan Masters (Star Control 2).

Biggest question for me: what is it? Have any screenshots / text examples? I've never heard of it, and now that this has been done, it's impossible to Google for.

I'm semi-perversely interested in porting it to Javascript :) But it'd strictly be a spare-time-when-I-feel-like-it-and-am-not-on-HN kind of project.

You can find it on Home of The Underdog. The official site got lost some rewrites ago, but there will probably come some new site again. I could add compiled versions to the repository for reference... It's a sokoban-like game, but a lot more enjoyable.

The .exe and the data files: http://plasmaworks.com/files/pits/pits95.zip

The level editor (Source Code got lost, but Apache-license is also valid for this one. If someone can disassemble it and create some maintainable sourcecode from it, very welcome) http://plasmaworks.com/files/pits/pitsedit.zip

Screenshot for reference (more googling for puzzle pits): http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.old-games.com...

You should add some screenshots to the GitHub repository.

I might be interested in getting this to work on linux. One question is, what license are the data files under, and if you could include them in the git repository.

All related files are Apache-licensed, as by consent of Abe Pralle (and in case of doubt, just mail him!)

I will include the data-files in the repository. This is the very first release, and it's far from perfect as it is of course.

Does this currently compile in a DOS emulator using djgpp?

You might need to factor out the TASM code hidden in pragmas in SETMODE.H first. Better yet, remove all asm and retarget for something less arcane, like Allegro or even SDL.

If you want to keep it as is, Turbo C is free online, from Borland.

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