Game Boy Zelda Comes With Source, Sort Of

Jamie found a fun story about a 90s Zelda Game Boy ROM that shipped with the source code- not so much on purpose, but more because the linker padded out the last meg of ROM with random memory contents, which happened to include game source code.

Comments

Avoiding the malloc()

[kcbanner]

I guess the only way to really avoid the malloc() calls grabbing your source code would have been to compile, then reboot to link...so the extra data thats padded on the end of the ROM image would just be your emtpy RAM contents.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could, you know, manage your memory properly.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[MBCook]

Am I missing some reason that you can't just pad with 0s or 1s? Why bother with random data?

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[simcop2387]

thats what calloc is for, it'll clear it for you, malloc just gets it.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[uofitorn]

RAM contents aren't necessarily zeroed on reboot. In fact, researchers found that physical memory retained data for as long as 30 seconds while powered off on certain laptops.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[MBCook]

That was my point. There is no need to malloc the whole 2MB, just what you need. Pad whatever comes after with 0s or 1s, and any checksumming (unlikely on a GB cart) could be done trivially. You didn't need to allocate that extra space at all.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[LiquidCoooled]

In my first experience with IT, our technology teacher (who was also the metalwork guru) tried to show us the source code to the program.
He spent about 30 minutes loading the (BBC micro) computer and flicking the power switch to try to see under the hood.
"If you do it really fast it comes up and shows you the code"

Incidentally he was also the teacher who taught us about the wankel engine, I am not sure which caused a bigger laugh.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[billcopc]

When you're a ROM developer, you don't think in such terms. It's all about mapping this and interleaving that.

Rather than writing the extra few lines to calculate the padding required, set up a 0-filled buffer and truncate the first (or last) buffer, rounding up the fwrite call to 2mb requires 0 extra lines.

Besides, they don't expect many people to actually look at the ROM code. This emulation craze is fairly recent.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[simcop2387]

it was filled with things in ram, most likely because malloc was used to get the ram needed to link the image, and they didn't bother to clear it, calloc would have cleared it for them

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[Carrot007]

> This emulation craze is fairly recent.

What? I really mean it what?

I remeber running sonic (megadrive) on a low end pentium (133) back in the day, albeit with no sound.

I also remeber using various earlier emulators on my amiga before that (speccy and such).

Maybe you have a differnet definition of recent than me though.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[KDR_11k]

Or link to the past?

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[KDR_11k]

A pentium 133 is recent compared to this. When I got my Gameboy my PC was a C64, a bit later we got a 386. Sure, we weren't cutting edge but the best you could get at the time was a really early 486 IIRC.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[Kelz]

Reboot the link. Haha. Good one.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[Dogtanian]

A pentium 133 is recent compared to this. When I got my Gameboy my PC was a C64 That as may be, the game in question was released in *1998*. I bought my Pentium 233 PC that same year- and even then there were much faster processors available.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[Anonymous Coward]

"Maybe you have a differnet definition of recent than me though."

No, he just apparently has a different definition of "craze" to you. Being the only person in your state to emulate a megadrive on a low-end Pentium without sound doesn't mean that's when the emulation craze started. That was just you pushing the boundaries of what was available at the time. The average gamer wouldn't have understood you back then if you said the word "emulation" to them.

Only in recent years have so many people been emulating earlier consoles and arcade games on their home PCs, with pretty faithful representation of the original experience.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[antime]

Malloc isn't the only culprit - some old DOS-era linkers would directly allocate disk blocks but not clear them, so whatever old content that wasn't overwritten remained in the final binary.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[kevmatic]

First release of Zsnes was in 1997. It was designed to run on 486es, and was written in heavily optimized ASM.
NESticle was also released in 1997. These pretty much sparked a craze, and lead to the creation of the Emulation Community and its Golden Age was pretty much in full swing by the middle of 1998.

It has pretty much died, but Zsnes is still under very active development and the new pSX Emulator has revitalized Playstation emulation since ePSXe hasn't been updated in years and leaves MUCH to be desired.

http://www.romhacking.net/ for info on ROM hacking.
http://psxemulator.gazaxian.com/ for pSX Emulator. Try it!

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[PhoenixFlare]

Same here, I used to run all sorts of SNES games in ZSNES on a 200 MHz Pentium, at normal speed. Heck, I even managed to get a NES emulator running on a 20 MHz 386 with 2 megs of RAM....Only at about 30% speed, but still.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[SynapseLapse]

The parent's point is still valid.
The game boy color hit the market in 1998 and modern video game emulation was just starting to take off about then.
When the developers were working on the Zelda DX they weren't concerned with emulation. Their code has gone unnoticed for 9 years now. Emulation has been around for decades. The emulation "craze" is far more recent.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[zippthorne]

Um.. the Wankel engine works. There's one in the Mazda RX- series.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[iamhassi]

"That as may be, the game in question was released in *1998*."

actually the color-added version was released in 1998 but the original came out in 1993, and since you can play the 1998 version on the old monochrome gameboy methinks it's not truly a title that was entirely redone for the gameboy color and it makes me question whether this left over code could also be found in the 1993 monochrome version of Link's Awakening.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[PhoenixFlare]

and the new pSX Emulator has revitalized Playstation emulation since ePSXe hasn't been updated in years and leaves MUCH to be desired.

Thanks for this link - had just yesterday decided to try and get espxe working again, 2 hours of tweaking settings didn't achieve what the new one does with no setup besides the gamepad configuration.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[LiquidCoooled]

A group of 12-13 year old lads don't care if something "works".
The name set the tone for the entire lesson and every single reference was followed by the entire class breaking down in fits of giggles.
As for the technology itself I never once disparaged it.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[arashi no garou]

I'm pretty sure the laughing was due to the name of the engine and not the question of its efficiency or practicality. Personally I am a fan of rotary engine technology.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[jmv]

I guess the only way to really avoid the malloc() calls grabbing your source code would have been to compile, then reboot to link...

How about:
- Using calloc() instead of malloc()
- calling memset() after malloc()
- Using a good ol' for loop

You make it sound like writing (zeros) to memory wasn't invented at that time!

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had roms for nintendo and snes for over a decade.

Remember Snes9x?

It's been around and well known for a LONG time, you just seem to have been out of the loop.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[aichpvee]

Where's the source?

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[kcbanner]

This is DOS we're talking about ;P

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[nurb432]

I remember running MSDOS on PCDitto long before that.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[sukotto]

Reboot to link

ha ha very punny :-)

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[CastrTroy]

I remember a big craze back when I was in highschool. About 10 years ago. Almost all the kids were into it. We played mostly NES and Gameboy games. I remember Pokemon being a huge hit. I actually think it was more popular back then than it is now. You could play games on your computer that were only 1 generation behind the current technology. Now the emulation hasn't really kept up with the advancing consoles. The bests emulators you can find are Playstation and N64, which are very old systems by today's standards.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[Romancer]

Again the "recent" word being used without numerical thought. The game was released a year after the defacto emulator (zsnes) was created and was downloaded by millions a year after that. These numbers are not recent, they also don't define a craze but they at least help narrow the discussion.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[freeweed]

Actually, as one who followed the whole thing pretty closely, the GP was definitely correct. The days of everyone and their dog running console/arcade emulators on their PC was years ago. There's been little activity in the area since maybe 2001-2, and anyone doing it now has either just bought a PC, or is a die-hard emulation enthusiast.

Seriously, in recent years emulation has reached the masses by way of officially licensed collections of ROMs for PS2, Gamecube, etc - but in terms of running an emulator on the PC? No average person has done it in years. The craze was most definitely around 1998-2000 or so. It wasn't just some guy running it without sound - that might have been in the 1995-6 timeframe.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[Opportunist]

Yup. The compiler could also simply clear out the ram. It's not like a compiler is a time critical application that cannot be bothered to make a "needless" call. At the very least when compiling the release version, zeroing the mem should be a given.

Of course, I'm quite sure the creators of the compiler just didn't think of the possibility. It's rather negligance than trying to squeeze the last nanosecond of speed out of the compiler. Like I said, compilers are hardly real time applications.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[mikael]

The point is that the game was developed using an emulator running under a MS-DOS/Windows system. When it came to saving the image used to burn the ROM cartridge memory, the cross-compiler simply malloc'ed a large block of memory, copied the code, data and static stack segments into this block and wrote the solidified block out. Unfortunately, the block of memory also contained fragments of system memory (editor source code, registry settings, and just about everything else floating about in system memory). The cross-compilation tools developer should have used 'calloc' instead of 'malloc', except that 'malloc' is generally quicker.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[Monsuco]

Only in recent years have so many people been emulating earlier consoles and arcade games on their home PCs, with pretty faithful representation of the original experience.

Not just PCs dude. the origional Xbox could be modded as a wonderful emulator and playing with real controllers rocks. The Wii has emulators for sale. I see the consoles as being golden age 2.0 of emulation.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

It was, but presumably not writing the zeros was faster, and a faster linker meant faster development time, so compiler/linker developers learned to favour speed over trivial-seeming things like clearing memory.

If the game developers wanted to zero that memory, they could probably have done it after the linking step was done.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[aichpvee]

Fuck RMS and fuck you too, asshole coward. PSX emulators should be open sourced because the authors tend to drop the projects before they're complete and then everyone loses. That should be good enough reason to open source for anyone. You clearly don't agree with your own idiotic statements because you aren't willing to put your troll on the record. Get lost.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[cheater512]

This is rather old dont you think? It didnt matter at all back then.
These days you would do it properly of course.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[aywwts4]

Anyone remember digging around the dark side of the internet (Pre-p2p) scouring virus ridden german warez sites for hours trying to find a handful of roms while fighting to keep the porn popups away? No I'm sure everyone here somehow managed to know about all the Usenet groups and all the private IRC and FTP sites and never had to do that.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[OrangeTide]

This particular game came out in 1998. So we're talking on the very edge of when the original Pentium was no longer being produced and Intel was getting ready to migrate manufacturing to replacing Pentium I/II with Pentium III.

But yes. for the original GameBoy, a 486 would have been pretty cutting edge. and XTs and 286s were still very common systems.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[ultranova]

The bests emulators you can find are Playstation and N64, which are very old systems by today's standards.

PSX emulators - ePSXe in particular - are okay, if a bit slow on my machine; but I've never seen an N64 emulator which wouldn't have been alpha quality (meaning very slow and crashes. Is there a useful one fro Linux there; I'd really like to play OoT ?

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[G Fab]

Well, obviously the AC was being a troll (And a moron), but if this author is willing to share his source with other programmers, I think that's cool of him. This emulator is his own work, and if he doesn't want to open source it, I think that's his right.

Even if that's bad for the community (it obviously is).

We give props to those who share their work precisely because they didn't have to be that generous. It's wrong to condemn those who exercise their rights. After all, if you truly are this dedicated to PSX emulation being open sourced, you would write an emulator and publicize your code. You and I aren't willing to pay that kind of price, so it's unfair to demand that this author do so.

I guess I care a lot less about the PSX emulator because I have so many playstations of various generations that can run these discs. Do you find this useful just because it can run your backups? How much of this stuff is piracy?

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[LKM]

If you RTFM, you'll find that after looking at the source they found, they think Nintendo may have lost the original source code to Link's Awakening (which would be truly sad) and had to dissassemble it to create DX. So the original game probably has different stuff on it, if anything.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[LKM]

I remember Connectix had an awesome PS1 emulator for Macs called "Virtual Game Station". It ran PS1 games perfectly well even on early PPC Macs such as the toilet seat iBook. Current Playstation emulators should not run slow on current machines, I think...

But you're right about the N64. I've yet to see a really good N64 emulator.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[Stonent1]

I've dumped bios data from a Dell laptop before and snooped around using the strings command in Linux. I found the words "Back in the saddle" , some compiler information, a few snips of code and lots of error messages in plain text. On one bios at least, there was a warning inside that the bios was a beta release and not for production use.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[wed128]

They don't, but the development toolkit likely did (this was the 90's)

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[rbanffy]

And since when did anyone develop gameboy software in a gameboy?

But that's an interesting question: What kind of computer did they use top develop those games?

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[CastrTroy]

You obviously don't remember UltraHLE. It was (is) an emulator that worked only with 3DFX cards and got very good results for the games that it worked with. The problem from what I recall was that it only played a few games, such as Mario 64, Zelda OOT, and Waverace. I think there may have been a total of 15 games that worked. It could also be used without a 3DFX card via a 3DFX wrapper, but performance in this case was very bad. That was back around 1999-2000. I remember looking up the N64 emulators a couple years back and finding that they had improved them quite a bit in terms of getting them to work on a wider variety of computers, but also remember that they hadn't got a whole lot of games working. I wonder what was so special about the N64 that made it so hard to emulate, especially considering the high quality of the PS1 emulators.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[poot_rootbeer]

Now the emulation hasn't really kept up with the advancing consoles. The bests emulators you can find are Playstation and N64, which are very old systems by today's standards.

Those are the best hobbyist-authored emulators, perhaps.

Microsoft and Sony have both implemented backward-compatibility in their 7th-generation consoles by writing emulators for their 6th-generation consoles. Since they had access to the official specs (and often, the original design talent) for the emulated systems, they were able to write emulators the exceed the capabilities of even the brilliant hackers and reverse-engineers that work on things like Project64 and MAME.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[hansamurai]

I played Jet Force Gemini last week perfectly on the latest stable release of Project 64. Widescreen worked just fine and the sound worked a lot better than on ePSXe.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[Overly Critical Guy]

Only if you define ten years ago as "in recent years."

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[aichpvee]

Yeah, I guess it's better than nothing that he's willing to share the source with serious developers, and as someone else said he'd likely release it if he were going to drop the project. But that's still no guarantee and likely he'd just forget about it.

And I've actually used PSX emulators to play my legit PSX games, despite having a PS3 (and a PSX and PS2 that are indefinite loan to my brother). Mostly for the save states, something Sony REALLY should have implemented with for PSX games on PS3.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[Dirk Pitt]

A bit of a non sequitur - I completely agree that the compiler should pad with 0s at least as an option - but I must say that the compiler can be a time critical application. Certainly not real-time, but slow compiles can be a pain.

We have about 600 developers working on our primary product. Nightly compiles can top 40,000, individual developer projects can easily generate 1000s of compiles. Yes, dependency management is an important aspect of our development and it saves more time than anything, but there are common scenarios where we need to complete a large number of compiles. So multiply a compiler inefficiency by 600, and add to your favorite pointy-headed power point presentation on development cost...

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[Torvaun]

Yep, I remember that. During class, no less, because we had a truly sucktastic internet connection at home, and the school was blazingly fast.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[billcopc]

Having played both versions, they do have minor differences in gameplay, but we're talking about teeny weeny little timing issues like a certain water maze about 2/3rds into the game that was originally frustrating, but the DX version made a tad easier due to some change in the way the water's current was implemented.

I wouldn't be all that surprised if they did have to recode some of it. Keep in mind that 2D games are almost trivial to code for any game developer, so it's not as big of an effort as you'd think. The fun part is that the code being so simple, you usually end up improving during the rewrite since you're aware of the entire project. Back in those days, many "2.0" games were the result of a partial or complete rewrite that elegantly solved various hacks.

Re:Avoiding the malloc()

[billcopc]

Precisely.

"Craze" to me is when a non-technical person can run an emulator with a few mouse clicks, or by poking around with their Wii. Marat Fayzullin (remember him?) was not a household name, even though he was the developer of a very popular Game Boy emulator.

These days you can hop on any garbage P2P client, type "game boy" and get a list of preconfigured emulators and frontends with EVERY SINGLE ROM. Any half-brained suburbanite can run it.

Just look at MP3... back in the 90's we had them, and by "we" I mean geeks. bongo.tamu.edu was a "large" collection, they had maybe a couple hundred tunes. Today, my mother has an MP3 player in her car (it came with it). She probably didn't know what an MP3 was until a couple of years ago.

Just because Slashdotters are aware of tech, doesn't mean it is mainstream.

Deja Vu

[hlomas]

News Post Comes With Article, Sort Of

Whoops...

[foldingstock]

Awesome. :) This must be why they always say not to code whilst drunk.

Re:Whoops...

[mouse_8b]

Awesome. :) This must be why they always say not to code whilst drunk. Who says that? They should be shot.

Re:Whoops...

[JensenDied]

Someone has never heard of the Ballmer Peak.
Windows ME is why they say not to code the entire project smashed though.

Re:Whoops...

[Scruffy Dan]

Obviously you have never heard of the Ballmer peak. And you cal yourself a programmer...

Re:Whoops...

[Cappy Red]

You might change their minds if you give them a shot or two.

Air Fortress (NES) had exact same issue!

[Dwedit]

Air Fortress (Famicom version) also included a portion of the source code due to not clearing memory before linking.

Re:Air Fortress (NES) had exact same issue!

[Indefinite, Ephemera]

There was also a chunk of code discovered in Secret of Evermore.

Re:Air Fortress (NES) had exact same issue!

[jez9999]

Re: Secret of Evermore

Strange, unused, and testing text is scattered throughout the ROM, in addition to what looks like a chunk of C programming code. No, that's just the ingame script.

Not true

[Megane]

Now the site is Wordpressed (like Slashdotting, only the other way around) and you can't get to it, but one of the last posts before it died pointed out that this was from a trainered version. That's where someone adds cheat code to a ROM. As it turns out, the original doesn't have any of the code in question. Dissassembling for the purpose of adding cheats is a completely sensible explanation of the code that was found.

The moral of the story? Start with a known clean dump (look for the "[!]" tag) before assuming that the introns were in the original game.

Re:Not true

[Kjella]

Now the site is Wordpressed (like Slashdotting, only the other way around) and you can't get to it, Uhh, the wordpress site is down and slashdot is up - that's a classic slashdotting. A "wordpressing" would be if the wordpress blog linked to slashdot, and enough people came to slashdot to bring slashdot down (good luck on that).

Re:Not true

[Anonymous Coward]

Hang out on digg more often, where blogs (powered by wordpress) are linked all the time. A site running wordpress dies after 5 hits, from cpu usage not network usage, and hence the site is "wordpressed". It's backwards because the site is doing it to itself really, not because of slashdot traffic.

Re:Not true

[stoolpigeon]

well he did say it was from digg- no need to be redundant.

Re:Not true

[Anonymous Coward]

The term DOSsed is sufficient.

Re:Not true

[eulernet]

Agreed.
The 'disassembled' routines are simply a filling routine with register D and a copy routine.
As a Z80 developer, you really don't need to disassemble this kind of routines.

I guess the source code parts come from the intro, and its coder was not very good either. For example: CALL/RET instead of JP or disassembling a copy routine, and keeping it called L_B000_2914.

Re:Not true

[noidentity]

Or something anyone would understand: overloaded. "The server was overloaded with all the visitors."

Re:Not true

[Bert64]

Yes, wordpress is rather inefficient...
How do php accelerators such as eaccelerator affect it, and what level of hardware would you need to handle a significant load of wordpress hits?

Re:Not true

[Joe Tie.]

The absolute simplest way is just to replace the front page with a static html file. I think the latest version of wordpress even has some mechanism in place to automate it if needed.

Re:Not true

[Scruffy Dan]

I always assumed that was because people frequently ran wordpress on servers that can't handle much simultaneous visitors.

Is wordpress really that bad? or is it frequently being run on under-powered servers.

Re:Not true

[David Gerard]

WP-Cache is just the thing to avoid massive PHP and MySQL overload.

Re:Not true

[Hal_Porter]

Yes, wordpress is rather inefficient...
How do php accelerators such as eaccelerator affect it, and what level of hardware would you need to handle a significant load of wordpress hits? You just change all the callocs in the wordpress code to mallocs. Cuts out all the overhead.

This is a non-story

[Dwedit]

This is a non-story. This only applies to a specific Pirate ROM Dump of Zelda DX. The clean dump does not contain any embedded source code.

Re:This is a non-story

[LittleBigLui]

Where would the pirate rum dump ...

Arrr.. Don't dump the rum, drink it!

It happens

[Diomidis Spinellis]

This used to happen more often than one would expect. In the 1980s I found portions of Ashton Tate's Framework II source code in "blank" sectors of floppy disks containing printer drivers. Those were the days where:

• each application came with its own display and printer drivers,
• people were using floppy disks to move around source code, and, worse,
• other people had enough free time to trawl "blank" sectors for interesting tidbits.

Re:It happens

[urcreepyneighbor]

other people had enough free time to trawl "blank" sectors for interesting tidbits. Eh? I still do that.... Then again, I am urcreepyneighbor....

Re:It happens

[KDR_11k]

That's nothing, I bought a pack of supposedly empty 5.25" disks for my C64 in a store, when I looked at them without formatting it turned out they were all filled with warez. Different warez, even, not the same for all disks.

Re:It happens

[PCM2]

A company I worked for once participated in the beta test program for Adobe Illustrator ... I think it was version 7. We were primarily a Mac shop, so we were using the Mac versions of the CD-ROMs they sent us. One build they sent us had a funny property... when you put the CD-ROM in the drive, the Trash can would turn full. Oh but wait -- before you old Mac people start going "ho ho ho," there wasn't actually anything important in the Trash can. But that's when I noticed that a couple of extra folders would appear on the desktop, too. ;-) In one of those was about 340MB of source code for Adobe Illustrator, Dimensions, Streamline and some other stuff.

About four days after we received this particular build (and I had noticed its interesting attributes) I got a call from Adobe:

Adobe: There are problems with the latest build of Illustrator. We need to recall those CD-ROMs immediately.

Me: Gosh ... sounds bad. Problems?

Adobe: Yes. We will be sending you a prepaid FedEx return envelope. It's extremely important that you return those discs to us right away.

Me: I see. Oh, my. Look ... can you tell me what the problem is? It's not a virus, is it?

Adobe: I can't really say. It's a technical issue. But if you've installed Build 378468434 on any of your equipment, you should un-install it right away.

Me: Oh, dear. Oh, dear oh dear. I will do so, ma'am, immediately. It ... it wouldn't damage any of our systems, would it?

Adobe: Um... you should be OK. But, just to be on the safe side you should be sure to uninstall it from any of your machines and make sure you send those CDs back to us right away.

Me: Yes ma'am, will do.

Adobe: Thanks, have a nice day.

Me: (pushes eject button on CD-R burner, grabs a Sharpie)

Re:It happens

[grub]

Ohh... I really did like Framework. We used that along with dbase III at a few workplaces back them. The two worked together nicely (for the time anyhow)

Re:It happens

[laughing_badger]

Wouldn't happen to have the source for Framemaker would you? I'd love to get that working under OSX...

Re:It happens

[PCM2]

Wouldn't happen to have the source for Framemaker would you? I'd love to get that working under OSX...

Haha, no. And, given that this was probably around 1997, I doubt that the code would be of much use to you anyway. If I remember right, what I got was neatly organized into CodeWarrior projects, but it wasn't complete, i.e. it wouldn't actually build a binary.

Re:It happens

[Deadstick]

Ashton-Tate wasn't above having somebody ELSE's code in their products either. When they wrote the "laser burn" copy protection routine for dBase III, they needed to put a hook in the BIOS -- which wasn't so easy in those days of expensive memory, because the BIOS used to run directly from ROM instead of being shadowed out into RAM. So they wrote their own BIOS -- by which I mean, they copied some 700 bytes of the IBM Fixed Disk BIOS (which was published in the PC-XT user manual), added the hook, and then hid the dirty deed under an encryption routine that was absurdly simple (although very tedious on a floppy machine) to penetrate.

It was obvious they knew they were writing a pirate product, because they went through the code and swapped arithmetic and logical shift instructions wherever they were certain to produce identical results, presumably in order to get the fraction of identical bytes down.

rj

Re:It happens

[empaler]

... so, you bought a pack of used disks from the store? Did you return and complain or did you just keep your loot? :-)

Re:It happens

[Skater]

I read this entire thread, hoping for an explanation of the thousands of bugs in dBase IV, but I was disappointed. Your message came the closest, though. If you have something on that topic, I would love to hear it.

(Side note: I go by "RJ" too.)

Re:It happens

[marcansoft]

It still happens. Nowadays it tends to be random files leftover in a game's directory structure. I seem to remember that Halo 2 came with a script file in one of the directories (I may be wrong on this one), and the Gamecube version of Twilight Princess comes with the Wiimote sounds still in there, plus a different file with some Mario sounds (maybe there's and embedded mario minigame in the Wii version? Or perhaps it's just a demo file). The GC TP also has a whole bunch of linker map files if I remember correctly.

Not too uncommon

[0123456]

One of the 'Elite' sequels was shipped with a swap file on the CD-ROM. Opening that swap file with a text editor showed it included much of the C code for the game, which presumably must have been swapped out while they were compiling at some point and then copied to the CD by mistake.

From what I remember the installer copied the swap file to the hard disk, but the first patch either deleted it or zeroed it :).

Re:Not too uncommon

[Anonymous Coward]

I purchased the game "Pirates of the Caribbean" a few years back. My original Sid Meier's Pirates was corrupted and the new one was not yet out. The game was not very good at all. However, when I looked at what was on the disk, there were several files with a .c and .h extension. Sure enough the disc had a lot of source code on it. I am not sure if it was the entire game and I do not know which box I packed it in the last time I moved, so I cannot find it at the moment. However, I remember seeing the C code for that game on the disc I purchased at a retail store.

Re:Not too uncommon

[vranash]

Having that game (Which was actually Bethesda's Sea Dogs 2 rebadged before release.) It had a *TON* of files with it, although I think they were lua-scripts or something, not actual c-code. Regardless they had a lot of options available in them for modifying core components of the game. You could change your characters starting stats, name, ship type, etc. Given the somewhat frustrating land-side swordplay, I ended up having more fun tweaking the game than playing it.

Having reminded me, I may have to dig it out sometime soon and see what else it's got going.

Re:Not too uncommon

[rucs_hack]

I bought a bbc model B just to play elite when both where pretty new, and found a text record of a conversation in the BBCs CMOS (think it was there, that was what I was playing with when I found it).

It was two guys sending text back and forth talking about the legs on a woman who'd just entered the office. It was pretty well buried. I'm guessing they just forgot they'd been clowning around and it got left in when the BBC was put into production. I did write it down at the time, but this was in the eighties...

I can't recall how I found it exactly. It was late, I was hacking about trying to find something I could alter as a joke on a friend, and there it was. It made I chuckle.

I gave the BBC away eight years ago, along with Elite (still had it, and it still worked:). Didn't take me long to regret it. For one thing I'd be able to go find that conversation again now.

Re:Not too uncommon

[Anonymous Coward]

The BBC model B didn't have CMOS ram. The operating system ROM did have a chunk of text in the memory-mapped IO area. It read:

(C) 1981 Acorn Computers Ltd.Thanks are due to the following contributors to the development of the BBC Computer (among others too numerous to mention):- David Allen,Bob Austin,Ram Banerjee,Paul Bond,Allen Boothroyd,Cambridge,Cleartone,John Coll,John Cox,Andy Cripps,Chris Curry,6502 designers,Jeremy Dion,Tim Dobson,Joe Dunn,Paul Farrell,Ferranti,Steve Furber,Jon Gibbons,Andrew Gordon,Lawrence Hardwick,Dylan Harris,Hermann Hauser,Hitachi,Andy Hopper,ICL,Martin Jackson,Brian Jones,Chris Jordan,David King,David Kitson,Paul Kriwaczek,Computer Laboratory,Peter Miller,Arthur Norman,Glyn Phillips,Mike Prees,John Radcliffe,Wilberforce Road,Peter Robinson,Richard Russell,Kim Spence-Jones,Graham Tebby,Jon Thackray,Chris Turner,Adrian Warner,Roger Wilson,Alan Wright.

The BASIC ROM didn't have room for any extra text; the only cruft in the whole 16K is the name "Roger" in the last five bytes. The optional disk filing system ROM doesn't have any extra text either (I just checked).

I don't know what you saw, but it wasn't a standard part of the BBC micro.

Re:Not too uncommon

[rucs_hack]

The BASIC ROM didn't have room for any extra text; the only cruft in the whole 16K is the name "Roger" in the last five bytes. The optional disk filing system ROM doesn't have any extra text either (I just checked).

This was a long time ago, I might be wrong about exactly where it was, but it was a standard bbc model b with no software running, and the text was there. You should dig about more.

Wish I still had it, probably wouldn't take me long to find where the text was.

Re:Not too uncommon

[Alioth]

Sure you didn't have some optional sideways ROM or a sideways RAM board? The BBC doesn't have a CMOS battery backed memory (the Master does though).

Re:Not too uncommon

[rucs_hack]

It was a rather expensive one, and yes, I did have extra's. I bought the best that was available, much to the annoyance of my friends. It had a speech synthesis chip for one (not that I could ever get it to work well).

Partially Not Not true

[hxnwix]

Now the site is Wordpressed When slashdot brings down a site running Apache, we call it slashdotting, not Apache-ing. When slashdot brings down a site running wordpress, we call it slashdotting, not wordpressing.

the original doesn't have any of the code in question Are the other games mentioned also trainered?

"X-Men - Wolverine's Rage" (MD5: b1729716baaea01d4baa795db31800b0), which contains Windows 9x registry keys and INF files, "Mortal Kombat 4 (MD5: 7311f937a542baadf113e9115158cde3), in which you can find some small source fragments, "Gift" (MD5: e6a51088c8fea7980649064bd3a9f9ff), which will tell you that the developers had some Game Boy emulators installed on their system, or the "BIT-MANAGERS" games "Spirou" (MD5:5aa012cf540a5267d6adea6659764441, Turbo C, MAP file, source) and "TinTin in Tibet" (Game Boy Color version, MD5: 8150a3978211939d367f48ffcd49f979), which, amongst other things, contains references to Nintendo's Game Boy Advance (!) SDK ("C:\Cygnus\thumbelf-000512\H-i686-cygwin32\lib\gcc-lib\thumb-elf\2.9-arm-000512, "/tantor/build/nintendo/arm-000512/i686-cygwin32/src/newlib/libc/stdio/stdio.c").

Re:Partially Not Not true

[dattaway]

Wordpress has rightfully earned this term. Wordpress is so script intensive that nearly every web page on a server farm, that a few concurrent hits causes the load average to soar. Wordpress may be responsible for a significant portion of electricity usage in data centers. Want to kill every virtual account on a server? Install Wordpress.

Re:Partially Not Not true

[OverlordQ]

Wordpress has nothing on older versions of moveabletype.

Re:Partially Not Not true

[ConceptJunkie]

Now the site is Wordpressed

When slashdot brings down a site running Apache, we call it slashdotting, not Apache-ing. When slashdot brings down a site running wordpress, we call it slashdotting, not wordpressing.

Except Wordpress comes pre-Slashdotted for your convenience.

Malloc clears?

[4D6963]

While modern operating systems will always clear all malloc()ed memory, so that you cannot get to other processes' data

What do they mean by clear the memory? Because when I malloc() (and not calloc()) I seem to get whatever was there before..

Re:Malloc clears?

[0123456]

"What do they mean by clear the memory? Because when I malloc() (and not calloc()) I seem to get whatever was there before.."

But you don't get anything from another process. When malloc() runs out of memory and asks for a new chunk from the operating system, a modern system will usually zero the block that it returns, whereas some older operating systems (e.g. MS-DOS, I think?) would just give a pointer to a chunk of free memory which could still contain any data that the previous user had left in it; that could be any program which had previously run on the machine.

When you free something and call malloc() again afterwards, you may well get a block with old data from your program. But in most cases you won't get a block with old data from a different program.

The same applies to disk files; with some operating systems in the past you could open a file, write a byte a megabyte into the file and then read a megabyte of old data preceding it in free blocks which had been allocated to you and not cleared. That was obviously a big potential security hole, so most modern operating systems will zero all the data in the file instead (more precisely, they'll probably allocate a sparse file which will return zeros from areas which haven't been written to).

Re:Malloc clears?

[KDR_11k]

Modern. We're talking about a Gameboy game.

Re:Malloc clears?

[mikael_j]

I think you're giving MS-DOS too much credit when it comes to memory management. Basically, it was single-tasking so you could just use whatever memory you wanted to.

/Mikael

Re:Malloc clears?

[Tony Hoyle]

It's not even zeroed.. it doesn't exist.

When you first malloc memory you get a page of memory that's set copy on write and backed from a special page in memory with nothing but zeroes in it. It's only when you first use the memory that physical memory is actually allocated.

Re:Malloc clears?

[multipartmixed]

Thanks. I was beginning to think NOBODY online today understood a modern(ish!) VM subsystem.

The rest probably got distracted looking at the dirty pages.

Re:Malloc clears?

[kasperd]

it was single-tasking so you could just use whatever memory you wanted to.

That is not the reason. Yes it was essentially single tasking, but that didn't prevent you from having multiple programs in memory at once. But only one could be active at a time, and process control worked like a stack. But even though the other programs in memory were not running, there would still be memory belonging to somebody other than you, and some of them might even be providing some kind of service which you were relying on. So DOS in fact had to implement a full blown memory management. Of course since there were no protection you could write outside the memory allocated to you, the result would most likely be that you crashed the system. Ownership of memory was of course made a bit tricky by the fact that you could just allocate a chunk and leave it around when terminating, sometimes you would even do that on intention.

Multi tasking and protection are not that much tied to each other, you can implement the one without the other. But a modern operating system have both.

There's more

[Kayamon]

Golden Axe 2 (the arcade ROM) has a good chunk of it's source code contained in there too, including the source for it's security routine (oh the hilarity...)

And the PAL version of ICO (PS2) had an objdump of the entire ELF on the disc, which is basically a disassembly with full symbol information.

Re:There's more

[mrbobjoe]

And the PAL version of ICO (PS2) had an objdump of the entire ELF on the disc, which is basically a disassembly with full symbol information.

It is common for Gamecube games to include .map files, which name every function in the game executable.

PC-Engine CD-ROM

[JensR]

I remember looking at a PC-Engine CD-ROM ages ago - I think it was Golden Axe - that contained bits and pieces of the source code as well. Probably for the same reason.

In 1978, on cassette tape

[localroger]

As a kid I had a surplussed computer called the "Interact Model R." All of the game tapes were 8K even, and at the end of many of them I found commented 8080A assembly code for other games and the BASIC interpreter that was supplied with the system (yes, it was on tape for this machine). Starting with 200 lines of source I would eventually reverse assemble the entirety of what I later learned was Tiny BASIC.

Also,

[schnipschnap]

Gamepack ROMs were up to 8 Mbits in size (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy), while the article says something about padding a 2 MB ROM with random stuff. Hmm.

Re:Giving up.

[ceoyoyo]

"Stuff that matters" is sarcastic.

Actually, I've noticed that lately it says something about going outside. Also sarcastic.

Does anyone else...

[achenaar]

find it amusing that this happened because of the Link-er.
I can't be the only one...
Can I?

I'll get me coat.

Not a programmer are you?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

memset(ptr,0,size)

FoxPro

[Anonymous Coward]

Posted anonymously to hide my shame of working with visual FoxPro.

FoxPro, I discovered after shipping our product for 2 years, didn't really compile anything when you made an .exe It just included a runtime and the source code in the .exe file. If you looked at it ina hex editor, there was the full source code, complete with comments. Apparently there was an option to scramble the source code. The guy responsible for building the installation didn't do that.

Re:FoxPro

[Shados]

Java and .NET are almost like that. I mean, you need a decompiler, but the compiled bytecode is so close to the source, you can replicate the original fairly well from the bytecode, thus why many many commercial softwares ship with obfuscated binaries.

Re:FoxPro

[Doctor Faustus]

the compiled bytecode is so close to the source, you can replicate the original fairly well from the bytecode
That's probably a reasonable way to port between VB.Net and C#, if you felt like switching. Compile what you wrote, and then decompile into the other.

Re:FoxPro

[Shados]

Would be pretty long since the decompile is only like 99% accurate (some references to external libs will come up as hexa code and such), but when you did something VB.NET specific (like the way VB.NET can handle events through syntax sugars) and are curious how it works in C# for example, it works fairly well.

Re:FoxPro

[Doctor Faustus]

I might try that sometime to see what C# does with optional parameters...

Beatmania Best Hits

[Myria]

As for the source code in the ROM, check out some of the comments on our site. The slashdotters above commented on it above. This post is from months ago, too - why on Slashdot now?

Anyway, A Japanese PlayStation game named "Beatmania Best Hits" came with the complete source code to "Beatmania 5th Mix", another PlayStation game in the same series. Supposedly, it was complete enough to actually compile and run.

PlayStation games of the era had to have a ~30 meg file of zeros on them at the outer edge due to a problem with the drive. These were known as "DUMMY" files. Some unknown sneaky programmer at Konami put an LZH archive containing 5th Mix's source code as the DUMMY file. (The contents of the file didn't technically matter, it just had to be at the outer edge.)

Re:Mingw32 for the Advance SDK?

[tepples]

So the GameBoy Advance SDK uses MinGW32 and Newlib? Neat! Because so does the unofficial devkitARM used by homebrew developers on GBA and DS.

opensource

[Paul_Hindt]

Dude, get this...I downloaded this game, I think it was called Quake 3...well, I started poking around on their website and found all the source code! Crazy huh?

"sparky"

[El_Oscuro]

I once found a subdirectory called "sparky" on a CD which I got from Oracle which contained the complete unrestricted (no keys required) installation of MS-Office.

Re:"sparky"

[Archon-X]

I recall office 97 was swiss cheese anyhow. when it looked for previous office files to verify the upgrade, you'd point the installer at itself, and it'd be happy and install office ;)

Re:"sparky"

[Binestar]

Most Secure CD-Keys ever:

1112-1111111111
1113-1111111111
1114-1111111111

(etc)

Re:"sparky"

[CastrTroy]

I also recall there being some CD key which was basically all 1's, or something to that effect, which worked with Office 97 and a few other Microsoft programs.

Re:"sparky"

[El_Oscuro]

Using the all 1's CD-key has been our standard policy for installing older Microsoft software for years. We have the actual keys, but is just easier typing all 1's when asked for the key instead of looking for the real one.

Re:"sparky"

[El_Oscuro]

To convert the Win95 upgrade CD to the full version, just type:

C:\>dir > NTLDR

Now, install your "full" version of Win95 as usual. I got this little tip from Microsoft support.

Re:"sparky"

[Archon-X]

I believe that in fact the trailing digits had to be divisible by 7 for a valid key, so the 1 trick was just 'conincidence'

Re:"sparky"

[SuiteSisterMary]

The old algo was 'three random numbers, a dash, and seven numbers which, when added, total a factor of seven.'

Reminds me of Weitek

[Ungrounded Lightning]

This reminds me of one of the several oopsies that led to the demise of Weitek. (This one wasn't the last straw. But it was a pretty big bale.)

An administrator decided that, to save money, those darned resource-wasting engineers would be limited to one new floppy disk per week.

So floppies got reused a lot. And of course eventually somebody got sloppy.

The master for one of their graphics driver distributions was built on a recycled floppy disk. Of course the old files were deleted, rather than the disk being reformatted with a surface-analysis (and data wiping) pass. And of course this master was sector-cloned for production.

Turns out the entire source code for the drivers had previously lived on that disk - and many of the algorithms that made the product cutting-edge were either in the driver or had enough info in the driver source about what the chip was up to that it made reverse-engineering a snap.

So just apply any of several "undelete the lost files" tools to any copy of the distribution disks and you could recover pretty much the whole source code, comments and all.

Shortly after this, the best of Weitek's cutting-edge algorithms became industry standards.

That's one of the characteristics of Trade Secrets. Once it's no longer a secret (especially if the owner managed to leak it himself), it's public domain.

Re:Giving up.

[Architect_sasyr]

Mobile obviously means when you walk from the microwave to your chair... those three feet without my /. would be like an eternity in hell... the outside stuff is just a joke to make the so-called 'normal' people think we know what the 'light of day' looks like from more than those cheesy outdoor porn videos!

So did...

[Skater]

Yar's Revenge!

Hard to read it, though.

Re:So did...

[Mr Z]

That isn't source code though, it's machine code. It's not surprising when a game cartridge includes the machine code. In fact, it's pretty much expected. ;-) Yars' Revenge isn't even unique with regards to repurposing machine code as graphics patterns. Intellivision's B-17 Bomber does something similar for its "flak."

Re:So did...

[Skater]

Still, the fact that Atari was worried about the code getting out there is pretty enjoyable.

Re:So did...

[Dwedit]

It's much easier to directly read a cartridge to dump a ROM than to watch images on a TV screen, even if what flashed on the screen was the entire object code.

Re:Did someone forget to show up for work?

[Anonymous Coward]

After all the mistakes in today's stories, the editors must have committed ritualistic suicide to end their shame.

Re:The Bible

[Tweekster]

I want those 2 minutes of my life back.

Re:The Bible

[insertwackynamehere]

In my opinion, one is better off reading the Bible as a collection of stories and descriptions of our past, whether one believes it or not. Looking at it as some kind of source code is ridiculous and misses the point. Whether one believes the Bible or not, or believes it to varying degrees, it can be informative whether spiritually or historically. But looking for answers as though it is some kind of machine misses the point.

so, if the site ran on IIS, then..

[newr00tic]

Now the site is Wordpressed (like Slashdotting, only the other way around) and you can't get to it, If it were a MS IIS webserver, would "ShitPushed" be the correct definition? ;)

(..You lime-laced Teadrinkers can save your "buht IIS is sec0re n0wez!!11!!11!!" -turdmania for going about trolling some other post(s), ktnx..)

Re:The Bible

[Jesus_666]

To think that the Borg are so careful to keep their source code secret, yet it could be downloaded from the Bible, is almost as funny as this Zelda thing having its own source code in random padding in the game's image.

If we assum that the universe is infinite we can also probably read a hard disk image of a fully working Windows Vista Ultimate installation along with all greatest hits of several RIAA-owned artists from the background radiation somewhere. We can even do that today, from locally-available data, if we just apply enough transformation steps. Likewise, we can use Moby Dick as an accurate prediction of future (by the time it was written) events, just by fitting the data in there.

Even if the original Torah did contain all knowledge in some kind of compressed form, it would be indistinguishable from random noise and indeed I think that the exact same amount of knowledge could be found in all similarly-sized works of text.

Random memory contents?

[duckpoopy]

Subby has a different definition of random from the rest of the universe.

Re:Random memory contents?

[mollymoo]

It's quite clear that by "random", they meant "(psuedo-)randomly selected", which is a common and accepted use of "random".

Re:The Bible

[rice_burners_suck]

Yeah Jesus, but you forget one thing: There was a book published called The Bible Code, and they demonstrated through experimentation that codes were found in this Torah text that could not be found in any other text of similar size that was tried in the experiment. Bottom line? Put infinite monkeys at infinite keyboards for an infinite amount of time and let them pound away and one will produce the entire works of Shakespeare. Put one monkey at one keyboard for one day and he'll produce that operating system for you, duplicated bug-for-bug.

Re:The Bible

[Jesus_666]

Actually, I mentioned Moby Dick as a reference to an experiment that showed how you could read predictions about pretty much everything out of any text. Further information behind this link.

Probably Not That Unusual

[ab]

I've seen that before in Commodore 64 binaries, particularly something from Electronic Arts... "Worms" (not the one that came later, the automata game), I think, was one I remember, but it's been twenty years, so I could be mistaken.

Of course, if you look at a copy of it now, that stuff might've been removed to make it load faster. After twenty years, maybe I can deny knowing how that could've happened too.

The Ballmer peak

[fbonnet]

http://xkcd.com/323/

Re:The Ballmer peak

[fbonnet]

Note to myself: remember to expand all comments before posting.