 Bad idea: build a captcha library that embeds DOSBox so it can make you beat levels/puzzles from DOS games to continue. Prove you're a human! Beat Lifewater Oasis from Commander Keen 4! Defeat the Yeti in Kings Quest 5! Make sure 15 lemmings survive! Get the sword in Prince of Persia! 25 comments
I have thought about adapting Simon Tatham's puzzle collection to a captcha. Like it just gives you a puzzle with no instructions. ! Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego! We use geo-ip to automatically allow anyone showing up as accessing the site from the state of Oregon, of course. (that is only one slight degree sillier than something I have done professionally for a website) You know, I was just thinking yesterday I should reverse engineer that game, but I don't really have a reason to. Now I do. "have a population of at least 20,000 within 5 years in this game of SimCity 2000" Just throwing surfers randomly in point and click adventures and then telling them to find an item would also be funny. Do you know where to get the Cloaking Belt in Space Quest 3? How about the box of electronic bunnies in Full Throttle? Seems Gizmos and Gadgets is a 16-bit EXE compiled with Borland Turbo C++ (no floating point support) oh goody my favorite, OVERLAYS! as if segmented code wasn't enough of a pain, where you don't know where a pointer points to unless you see how it's used, now you don't know what code is CURRENTLY loaded at that position, because it changes! step up: find the fade out. see the game fades out when you go into a door. find where that code is, then see what gets called next. finding a fade out should be easy: look for when they reprogram the VGA palette registers to dim every color to black. found 5 places the palette is reprogrammed and all are in overlays. ugh. OKAY realistically this is a game that features several different games you can play, and games between games. they're just gonna make each one a separate overlay. so I need to figure out how it shifts overlays and how to track which overlay is active looks like the separate game engines are called puzzler, electric, and simple. I love when games use __FILE__ in their assertions. please tell me all your filenames please oh sweet laser jesus I found the upload palette function and THEY UNROLLED IT why do: for(int i=0;i<256;i++){ when you can do upload_color(0,palette[0]); and just repeat 251 more times the worst part is that this was done with a compiler from 1991 so there's no way it unrolled the loop itself. they did this manually oh that's cute. their set_palette function takes two arguments: a pointer to the palette, and a number of extra palettes to apply. so they could set up an array of palettes in decreasing brightness, and just do set_palette(&fade_pallets[0], 64) to go through them. but the same function is a regular one-time set_palette if you just pass 1 for the second argument. "hey ghidra what calls set_palette?" "I don't know! you're in 16bit segmented mode! pointers are MEANINGLESS |
Gregory's Server
Honestly just making it do The Incredible Machine puzzles would be hilarious