This is a crazy dream of mine. At least one other member of Planet VB is helping me make this dream a reality. I will ned to learn to code, obviously, but I have some experience with BASIC and html. I really need some skill with JAVA and C. Anyway, I figure it might be useful to share what I have on a thread.
Step 1 will be to disassemble the code for the MAC release of Spectre VR, Spectre Supreme and Spectre 1.0
Step 2 will be to reverse engineer source code for these games
Step 3 will be to create a port that offers multiplayer capibility on the VB. At this point I’m hoping to base it mostly on Spectre VR. If it becomes somehow possble to do multiplayer with more than two players, then that would be awesome.
Attached are the dumped resource forks
Attachments:
This is a screenshot of the mac version of the game set to black and white then tinted red with the filled polygons turned off
The second is what it might looklike with filled polys turned on.
I have then reduced the resolution to 324×224
I am no where near getting this working on a real VB. I have no idea if it can handle rendering filled polygons in 3d at 50 fps.
-
This reply was modified 5 years ago by
.
-
This reply was modified 5 years ago by
.
-
This reply was modified 5 years ago by
.
Attachments:
Ok, so I’m at the momment working on a java program that will parse throughthe MacBinaryII executable and let me copy thiungs out of it or run it through a disassembler. I’ve already used ResEdit for some of this, but unfortunately ResEdit wont let me copy some things very easily. I also need a betterway of dumping the shap resource than copying the data from resedit by hand.
Anyway, Ithought I’d share some developments. First of all the header of a macbinary is well known and is documented here
https://files.stairways.com/other/macbinaryii-standard-info.txt
It is also known that all macintosh applications have both a data fork and a resource fork. It was important to know which comes first in the binary. This sint something that is easy to find in documentation. So, time for some exparimentation. I found I can use BinHex 5.0 in baselisk to export binaries out of baselisk. Next I created a copy of Spectre 1.0 and exported it as a binary. Then I took the same copy and opened teh readme file for Spectre Supreme. Text files are purely data and show up in resedit as having a data fork. Its impoirtant to note that you cannot add data to the fork in an ID other than 128. Believe me, I tried. Anyway, open up the data resource in the readme with resEdit’s hex editor and copy the whole thing. Now back to the Spectre 1.0 copy. Open the data fork, then open data resource 128 in the hex editor, and past it in, then save. Run BinHex 5.0 on it and save this as Spectre 1.0 copy2
Now we have two binaries that we can compare in a hex editor. I used Hex Fiend. Anyway, The data stream size is listed as being located at offset 83 and its a long word, which means it will be offset 83, 84, 85, 86 and further down it says it must be in the range of 0000 0000-$007F FFFF. As we would expect, this value changes from 0000 0000 to 0000 0463 which in decimal is 1123 and corresponds exactly to the length of the data I copied into the data fork. The data I copied begins at offset 128
This same test method can be applied to locate any resource in the binary to confirm the documentation. I also tried deleting the ALRT resource and compared the one without an ALRT to the one that had it.
So in short, there is a header which is described in the link I include here, then comes a data fork, then a resource fork. The data fork may have a map, but I cant say for sure yet. What I do know is that the resource fork does have a map. Presumably this is at the start of the resource fork.
