Reused Brøderbund code

[foone]

Hi! I've been hacking on Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (Enhanced, DOS, 1990) which was made around the same time as Prince of Persia, by the same company. I've discovered that there's heavy reuse of code between this version of Carmen Sandiego and Prince of Persia, so the disassemblies have been very helpful for me in figuring out Carmen's code.

At the moment, I've matched 160 of 735 functions in CARMEN.EXE to ones in the PRINCE10.ASM file from the pinned thread.

I wanted to ask if there's any newer work on disassembling PRINCE.EXE? These files are 11 years old from the timestamps.

I know SDLPoP exists which probably meant there was no need to keep hacking on it (and I've already used some code from SDLPoP for my own uses: The decompression code was really helpful, I hate reversing compression algorithms).

Also, was this known about already? I did some searching on the forum but didn't see any mention of it. The code may be also shared with some other Brøderbund games from the period, like I spotted the same datafiles being used by Galleons of Glory: The Secret Voyage of Magellan (DOS, 1990), so I suspect the same code is backing it.

And if anyone is interested in my matching-function research I can export that. I'm planning to do it eventually when I finish up this Carmen Sandiego disassembly/decompilation project, but I can manually export some mapping files if there's interest.

Thanks!

[David]

Also, was this known about already? I did some searching on the forum but didn't see any mention of it. The code may be also shared with some other Brøderbund games from the period, like I spotted the same datafiles being used by Galleons of Glory: The Secret Voyage of Magellan (DOS, 1990), so I suspect the same code is backing it.

This is new to me!
I remember I once downloaded by a random game by Broderbund from Abandonia (maybe Stunts?) to see if it uses PoP-like DAT files.
It didn't. And I didn't try other games back then.

Now I downloaded Galleons of Glory from My Abandonware, and tried to export its DAT files using PR.
It works to some extent:

• Images are exported with a default palette.
  The palettes in this game have a slightly different format from the palettes of PoP1, so PR can't use them.
  Namely, there is an extra zero byte before the number of colors (0x10).
• Digital sounds are exported properly if I mark them as such in resources.xml.

Here is the resources.xml to be used with PR:

Magellan_resources.xml.zip

(3.34 KiB) Downloaded 45 times

By the way, the simpler font used in Galleons of Glory seems to be the same as the font used for the status bar in PoP.
Here is an example. Note the ESC glyph.
ESC is also present in the PoP font, but it's not used.

[foone]

Oh neat, I didn't realize Princed could be used like that on non-PoP games. I ran it against Carmen Sandiego and got the same palette issue. I'll look into patching Princed to support the other format.

I've got my own tool I'm working on for handling DAT files (I wrote it for Carmen before realizing that it was the same DAT as PoP and that tools already existed), so I think I know enough to build an XML file for the various carmen DATs.