Reconstructed Commander Keen 1-3 Source Code
pckf.com
pckf.com
Nice puzzle!
Is the ordering the only thing that can be recovered from the binary? If the hash is available anywhere, it should be possible to brute force the exact original names.
Huh, this is interesting. Is someone able to provide more detail?
The pace at which Id produced games has always been an inspiration for me. Large amounts of code reuse seems like an important clue as to how they were able to do that.[1] But how were they able to reuse code effectively to such a degree?
[1]: The other clues I have so far are Romero's legendary tool-making abilities, and Carmack's tendency to produce code that gets computers to do things they couldn't before.
To some degree this is amusing. For a decade or so, we people would talk about the “borrowed” PCs. Now hacker forums talk about who owns the IP. In my childhood I never would have guessed this culture shift towards IP maximalism but I imagine the lesson that copyleft licenses only work in a copyright enforced environment finally took!
Of course due to litigation and legal implications the statements in Masters of Doom are intentionally vague. The same goes for the founder's talks. No one lied or portrayed themselves in a ubermensch fashion, it was just talking in corporate language speak when you are not allowed to provide more details in public. There seems to be serious legal risk and maybe it got solved or not, but judging from the book's perspective, I believe that they solved the issue in combination with a non-disclosure agreement.
I think that the "Great artists steal" mantra is especially applicable to ID's early days. And code reuse is simply a variance - stealing from yourself.
In no way does the usage of third party libraries damage the ID myths. For example, owning IP and authorship is not the same. Also: one can use a programming framework for a below average app while another one builds an awesome app.
And this is what's MoD underlying theme: going your own way because you see a chance while staying in the current context. In the end, ID did what Softdisk did: developing and publishing games. One only with moderate success while the other conquered the world.
Latin alphabet epitomizes this day by day. 26 letters which seem laughable, but a fool with a great tool is still a fool. ;)
But carrying your full-size tower computers and CRT monitors home from the office at night/weekends sounds crazy.
There was a lot of code reuse between games. John Carmack is on record somewhere that the enemy navigation code from Doom and Quake still has its origins in some of the earliest 8-bit games he wrote in the 1980's.
When you have the experience, you already know how long it takes to implement the majority of the game, when we're speaking of these early 2D games using bitmaps, tiles, small animations and some monospace text. The gameplay code is game-jam sized in most instances, so a majority of it was I/O code and asset pipelines. You can chart a safe course to get through one tiny project, and then another, and another, and build a best-of the routines that worked. The coding style would be assembly-like at this time even if they were using C - no deep callstacks, mostly imperative "load and store", which allows for a lower level form of reuse than is typical these days by breaking down the larger algorithm into "load", "mutate", "mutate", "mutate", "store" each as separate routines. So you end up with some tight code when you get to run it through a lot of projects. Softdisk provided the opportunity for building that and getting paid.
This is released under GPL.
I wonder, who is K1n9_Duk3? Does he have the rights to actually release this, and put it under GPL?
What does "reconstructed" mean? Is this disassembled? And if so, is it really ok to put this under GPL then?
Based on what? Afaik decompilation is a grey area and projects that enforce clean-room design do it to stay out of this grey area.
I'm not a lawyer. I'm reasonably sure I'm right so the above is good enough for discussion, but if you need legal advice see a lawyer.
Not quite true. You and I both own the copyright to your translation. Neither of us can publish it without the other's permission.
I'm no lawyer, and this is no claim that it is/isn't one way or the other, but Super Mario 64 had a CC0 1.0 licensed decomp in 2019 with PC port in 2020 and Nintendo vehemently chased compiled copies of the game being shared and videos of the ports on YouTube but never went after the actual source code repo for either the decomp or port (which do not contain any of the assets). Of course there is nothing saying Nintendo can't wait 6 years and then issue action (just look how long they put up with Yuzu/Ryujinx before going after the decryption and other arguments just before the Switch 2 launched), but they were certainly aware of it when they took action against the resulting binaries/videos and didn't try to touch the code repo yet for one reason or another.
I expect some big court case to happen about this style of project within the next decade. Maybe not as big as Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., but still one that makes the news a fews times and gives direct precedent rather than comparisons to similarish cases.
Carmack was a genius.