
Development content accidentally shipped on a DOS CD-ROM game from 1993 - fortyseven
https://github.com/Fortyseven/RA_1993
======
franzb
Imagine my surprise when I came across the full C++ source code of UEFA Soccer
96 for DOS on a demos CD that shipped with a magazine!

I never saw that leak mentioned anywhere. I think I still have the code.
Should I share it, and how?

~~~
joshschreuder
I would share it with Archive.org for preservation. Not 100% sure how to do
so, sorry, but here might be a good start:

[https://archive.org/create/](https://archive.org/create/)

~~~
franzb
Just got in touch with Archive.org (by mail)!

------
gravypod
I really wish game companies would publish their old source for really out of
date games. I really wish I could see what went into making the games I love
like Fallout 1/2.

~~~
kibwen
Rather than attributing this to typical corporate behavior, I think there's a
simpler explanation: the source code simply doesn't exist anymore. Source
control wasn't especially distributed, pervasive, or reliable in the 90s (at
least compared to modern standards). And it's unlikely that anyone official
had the foresight to keep a copy around for the sake of digital preservation
twenty years in the future, especially given the licensing/copyright issues
that would probably prevent legal dissemination anyway. And even if a rogue
developer had the foresight to take a copy home and stuff it in a box in the
attic, that media has probably degraded to unreadability by now unless they've
been actively backing it up for the past few decades.

~~~
dirtbox
No, nonsense. Publishers keep everything, certainly the publishers I've worked
for. Sierra is one of the oldies that, to my slightly out of date knowledge,
still curates an archive of almost every asset for every game they've
released. I'm certain the source for some of the earliest titles have been
lost due to their hobbyist nature, but I've personally seen a raw list of the
available archive that included games released from 1980 onward.

~~~
buzzybee
This may be true of publisher in-house development teams, but I've seen and
worked at third party studios that do little to nothing about post-release
archival, a fact connected to having minimal IT controls and the end of a
project often resulting in a massive layoff. Things get lost in the dust-up;
dev kits get lent out from a publisher for one project and then aren't
returned. The build server gets "reused". The same version control repo is
used to ship two different games sharing the same engine. One coder stays
behind after the rest of the team has been let go or moved to something else,
in order to fix bugs, so he's the only one with the most up-to-date build.
What is left over is a mishmash of project artifacts but no guarantee that
"project K at point in time T" can be reconstructed in full.

And with some of those Sierra projects, their archival might have all the
assets they could find; that doesn't mean they have all the assets.

~~~
dirtbox
Sierra only had a hand full of devs who worked in-house.

------
0xcde4c3db
Sort of related: I don't remember specific examples, but I recall that several
games/apps have inadvertently shipped with partial source code recoverable by
an undelete tool because the developers simply deleted the source/build files
from the floppy that they were using for development before imaging it for
production, rather than wiping a new disk and copying only the release files.

~~~
rasz_pl
I only recall OSes. DOS SDK with email dump captured in empty space of full
disk image and not completely deleted scraps of source code for Amiga
Kickstart shipped on 1.0 disk.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
I found a reference to source code recovered from the DOS port of Double
Dragon II: The Revenge [1]. I could have sworn that I heard this story about
some well-liked Amiga or Atari ST game, though.

[1]
[https://archive.org/details/DRAGONII](https://archive.org/details/DRAGONII)

------
Alupis
> NET USE C: \\\JUSTIN_GRAHAM\DRVC

This must be the one and only, Justin Graham [1][2]. Congrats on your move to
Unity in January btw!

[1]
[http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/by_genre/devel...](http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/by_genre/developerId,1145/)

[2]
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinagraham](https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinagraham)

[3]
[https://github.com/Fortyseven/RA_1993/blob/master/UTIL/X.BAT...](https://github.com/Fortyseven/RA_1993/blob/master/UTIL/X.BAT#L11)

~~~
forvelin
Cool find over there, let's see if he will come for this topic here =)

------
Keyframe
It's been a lot of years, so my memory is vague, but on Wipeout (one of early
ones, probably the first one) either on PSX disc or PC one (more probably the
PC one). Psygnosis shipped norton commander makefile (equivalent) shortcuts
and random dev stuff on it. I regularly poked around game distributions like
that as a kid to see if there's anything of interest. I think that was the
only jackpot I came around. Poor jackpot, but exciting!

~~~
untog
I remember poking around the resources of Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun
back when it came out, and found sprites for a load of units that never made
it into the game. IIRC, they were actual tanks rather than the weird mech
units that where in the final (and IMO, disappointing) version.

Fun to think about the game that could have been.

------
firefoxd
Ah i have this disc right here.[1]

25 years and it Still works. I will start looking at the files.

Loom is an excellent game by the way.

[1]:[http://i.imgur.com/7YUXGnf.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/7YUXGnf.jpg)

------
mech4bg
I remember finding this on the CD as a kid and being blown away - I couldn't
understand why all this stuff had been included. Most of it was over my head,
but I played around with Deluxe Paint for ages. Would love to know the
backstory on this.

~~~
feld
This seems awfully familiar to me as well, but I can't be sure.

------
kutkloon7
Quite funny how times have changed. I think these development programs could
be written in a few afternoons these days.

Of course, most implementations would be 2+MB and require several frameworks.

------
manaskarekar
As an aside, for those that may not be aware, id Software has source code for
some big games on github.

[https://github.com/id-Software](https://github.com/id-Software)

------
samplatt
>UTIL/2B.BAT Copies files to the B: drive

Aw, man. I thought I was so original. (guess what I named copy copy-files-
to-A:-drive)

~~~
KevinEldon
I don't know. I'd guess either the practical 2A.BAT or the clever NOT2B.BAT

~~~
pimlottc
2B.BAT or NOT2B.BAT, that is the question.

------
fortyseven
While I find the content itself to be fascinating, I'd love even more to hear
the tale of HOW this happened. :)

------
fortyseven
I was afraid I wouldn't be able to make an ISO of the disc, because it's so
damaged... HOWEVER, it turns out someone ALREADY backed up v1.2 of this disc
to archive.org back in 2013. :)

[https://archive.org/details/Star_Wars_-
_Rebel_Assault_1993_L...](https://archive.org/details/Star_Wars_-
_Rebel_Assault_1993_LucasArts_)

------
dleslie
I owned this game as a kid and still have the CD; if only I had bothered to
explore the disk!

~~~
lebanon_tn
We didn't have Internet for the longest time. "Browsing the web" for me meant
browsing random parts of the file system and trying to figure out how it all
worked.

One time I broke my mom's work computer by renaming the Windows (95 or
earlier) system folder to be my name. She had to lug a desktop back to work on
the bus so they could fix it. Sorry mom.

~~~
NKCSS
My mom tought me how to 'manage' my own floppy disk...

Too bad I mixed up A and C while formatting... back then, nobody knew how to
install an OS; machine was declared 'bricked' and when on the attick... it was
6 years before another PC entered our household...

~~~
cube00
That's rough, I remember when I thought I broke our PC when I was young (turns
it was just a bad VGA cable) but I couldn't imagine what it would have been
like to lose it after having had access to it... books, TV, even my NES were
nothing compared to the things I could do on my PC.

------
i336_
Is this the first time these utilities (particularly DK.EXE) have ever been
seen in public?

~~~
fortyseven
There was a reference to it among a handful of SCUMM documents released last
year. The site is down at the moment, but Wayback Machine had some backups:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20160412081654/http://wilmunder.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160412081654/http://wilmunder.com/Arics_World/Games_files/The%20SCUMM%20Manual%20-%20Glossary.pdf)

~~~
i336_
This is amazing. It looks like this is the first time some of these tools have
seen the light of day outside LA. Wow.

------
flukus
Has/can anyone verified that these tools are safe?

We just had a false positive from our virus checker on our internal software
prompting me to go search checksums etc (not easy when you software is as
dated as ours) so I've been thinking about this, we are the perfect delivery
vehicle for malware.

Because this was an internal product our response was to white list the file,
but the whole dev and support teams were too eager to jump to do that before
even thinking to verify the dll in question was legitimate. If a nefarious
person every had enough access to our machines to modify these binaries then
it would go out company wide.

~~~
jandrese
Even if they are infected it would be with an ancient DOS virus. I guess it
could infect your DOSBox install?

------
bane
Just to echo some other sentiments, please put this on archive.org for long
term preservation.

------
beeswax
Awesome, thanks for sharing! Took me right back there. I was soo happy to have
that 2X CD drive and a 486DX to be able to play this game.

Back then we were implementing our own bitmap drawing apps (simply called a
PROGRAM back then) in Turbo Pascal (bgi256 ftw). We would challenge each other
to come up with faster flood fill algorithms or smaller image file formats.

Good ol' times

------
chjj
I love stuff like this. Some source code was shipped with the Ultima Online
Demo in 1998. It was encrypted, but a few private UO server hackers cracked it
and reverse engineered their internal scripting language. Really interesting
stuff: [http://uodemo.uo98.org/](http://uodemo.uo98.org/)

~~~
rootw0rm
That demo is extremely interesting. I was active on the old UO Demo forum. I
reversed _tons_ of UO clients and created patching tools that worked on
hundreds of client versions from T2A onward.

------
elastic_church
yeah I'm just going to clone and download that because github is a horrible
place for "historic preservation". Copyrights can be extended forever for all
practical purposes.

~~~
fortyseven
Aye, that's fair. I figured GitHub would just be a first step -- I just
started archiving all this today.

~~~
i336_
Ooh. What other things have you got tucked away? :)

~~~
coroxout
I'm very interested to see what comes next too! Please do post about any
future uploads to HN.

~~~
i336_
(Psst. I got this, not OP. One level up. Don't worry, I've made the same
misteak.)

~~~
bbcbasic
It's a rare misteak

~~~
bbcbasic
Rare, steak, get it? Nevermind

~~~
i336_
...Yup. :)

------
kevin_thibedeau
Isn't this a GitHub TOS violation.

~~~
fortyseven
If it turns out it is, I'll remove the infringing content. But considering the
age and circumstances, I'm giving it a shot for now.

~~~
JonRB
I'd recommend possibly sticking it on archive.org - I've seen other old
software on there. Either that or reach out to lucasarts and ask if it's okay,
I suppose. (As long as you get it in writing)

~~~
shinymark
You'd need to contact Disney. They own the IP now.

~~~
tradersam
LucasArts still owns the IP, Disney is just its parent company now. LucasArts
is the licensor, so I'd still recommend contacting them.

~~~
fludlight
IIRC, Disney shut down the game division when they acquired LucasFilm, so you
would have to talk to someone at the parent co (Disney). Disney has a lot of
old IP that's still very valuable, so they guard it aggressively[1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Willie#Copyright_sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Willie#Copyright_status)

------
gobusto
Related story: I put the game disc for the PS2 game "BCV: Battle Construction
Vehicles" into my PC last year to see if there was anything interesting on it,
and found several .h and .a files in a subdirectory:

[https://s17.postimg.org/itph8rsnz/agatha.png](https://s17.postimg.org/itph8rsnz/agatha.png)

Note: Despite what this image shows, the text encoding is actually SHIFT-JIS.

------
erickhill
Pretty sweet to have Deluxe Paint 2 on there. I wonder what "Enhanced" meant?
(Almost what you could get on an Amiga using version 3 or 4?)

~~~
fortyseven
Found an old PC Magazine article talking about it:
[https://goo.gl/cZ1R3M](https://goo.gl/cZ1R3M)

------
astannard
Deluxe Paint was an amazing tool! I spent so many hours on that tool doing
animations and paintings. I wonder what happened to that company?

~~~
robert_tweed
EA never really kept up the PC version for some reason. I actually used it
until around 2001 for all my web artwork (along with a DOS file conversion
tool whose name escapes me). I have a friend who's a very oldschool pixel-
artist. He still has an old DOS system purely because he's got so much work in
dpaint and can't get it running on anything else.

There is a spritual successor of sorts, called Cosmigo Pro Motion. I haven't
tried it yet (although I picked up a copy in a Humble dev bundle a while ago).
I hear it's the closest thing to dpaint for a pixel-oriented workflow, but
with more modern Photoshop-like features, as well as dpaint features from the
later Amiga versions that never made it to PC.

~~~
tokenrove
Also, grafx2 is very heavily DP-inspired:
[http://pulkomandy.tk/projects/GrafX2](http://pulkomandy.tk/projects/GrafX2)

Great for pixelling.

------
rootw0rm
in other news, the source for killer7 is no longer available here, lol:

[http://interone.co.jp/interone_games25/killer7/](http://interone.co.jp/interone_games25/killer7/)

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
We had the source for it? Damn! I hope someone archived it! That game was a
masterpiece.

~~~
rootw0rm
I mirrored the whole site some weeks back with a recursive wget, the source is
in there. I can post it up, not sure how big it will be, but there were quite
a few assets.

------
mrmrcoleman
All those tools brought back some pleasant memories! Thanks for sharing.

------
digi_owl
Do not recall ever making such a find.

But once i picked up a demo cd that seemed to hold a demo of Birthright: The
Gorgon's Alliance that seemed to be fully functional on the strategic level.

------
rootw0rm
I hated this game, probably still have the CD somewhere

------
jeffwilcox
Loved Rebel Assault! Thanks for posting.

~~~
teamonkey
It's part of the current Humble Bundle, if you're interested in replaying it.

------
discordianfish
A friend of mine once found a Windows 98 copy on an 'empty' still wrapped
CD-R.

------
weavie
I wonder if this still runs on Windows 10?

------
JabavuAdams
Please edit title to replace "it's" with "its".

