Digging for treasure in Aladdin’s source code

Re:Digging for treasure in Aladdin’s source code by shakna on Thursday October 12, 2017 @12:31PM (#15459144)

Since Data East's fall, tracking the source down seems hard, especially as many game companies of that era failed to preserve the source for many of their games.

Might be interesting to see how GOG got their Dark Sun bundle [0] running. It's backed by DOSBox, but the midi driver seems different, and some of Ravager's frequent bugs have disappeared.

Maybe a partial remake like you suggest in your article?

[0] https://www.gog.com/game/dungeons_dragons_dark_sun_series

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Re:Digging for treasure in Aladdin’s source code by ggambetta on Thursday October 12, 2017 @12:39PM (#15459236)

Oooh, that's super interesting! If it's backed by DOSBox I doubt it's recompiled from source, but I could ask :)

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Re:Digging for treasure in Aladdin’s source code by kbenson on Thursday October 12, 2017 @01:53PM (#15459809)

Theoretically they could be binary patching. By using a disassembler and a debugger to understand what's going on, in many cases bugs might be fixable inline, or by replacing old functions with a redirect to where it's been redefined (if there wasn't sufficient space to fix inline).

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Re:Digging for treasure in Aladdin’s source code by adamkruszewski on Saturday October 14, 2017 @06:50AM (#15471626)

Judging from their job postings they are resorting to binary patching more often than not (so it's not only theoretically).

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