In 90s of last century there used to be computer marketplace in centre of Warsaw, Poland, at the Grzybowska 25 street, open every Sunday. It was the biggest place at that time in my country, where you could buy hardware/software for PC, Amiga, Commodore and other stuff. I visited it few times as 9 year kid in 1997-1998. The marketplace consisted of stands in on open air, where you could buy boxed hardware and sofware (rather legal & genuine). How it looked like you can see in one scene of the "Ekstradycja 3" movie:
https://youtu.be/mVwBiIBar5c?t=2238
In addition to the marketplace, there was primary school nearby, where also on Sundays, you could buy stuff out of box, mostly pirated software, which you could either choose from pre-recorded sets or the seller could burn a CD (20PLN = 5$) or 3.25" floppy (5PLN = 1.25$) for you of what you wanted. This was shown in the following short movie:
https://youtu.be/mxQqsqqH8ao?t=62
Shortly after buing first computer (Pentium 166MMX), my father bought me CD from there called "Gry dla Dzieci" (Game for kids).
I still have it and it consists of a couple of games, DOS and Windows 95:
* 3D Dinosaur Adventure
* Barbie super model
* Beauty & the Beast
* DIZZY collection
* Fatty Bear birthay suprise
* Follow the Reader
* Hand of fate PL (Legend of Kyrandia 2)
* Huchback of Notre Dame (Dzwonnik z Notre Dame)
* Jungle Book
* Lion King
* Literki-cyferki
* Mickey 123
* Mickey ABC
* Mickey Jigsaw Puzzle
* Matematyka dla klas 3,4
* Putt Putt 1
* Putt Putt 2
* Scooter's Magic Castle FULL CD
* SMURFS PL (full CD)
* Timon & Pumba Jungle Games
Some of the games are even not available nowadays in internet (even google does not know them), for example:
1) Matematyka klasa III-IV, (c) 1994 by MAREX, Autorzy: Zbigniew Oględzki, Marek Wapniarz (ang. Mathematics for III-IV clases) - it was compiled in Turbo Pascal and allow you to learn four basic mathematic operations
2)Literki-cyferki (ang. Letters and digits)
3) Scooter's Magic Castle V2.0 CD - this one can be "grabbed" from Internet, but the version available in described CD has ability to choose one of three background music tracks
More curiously, a few games present on the CD are packed as ARJ with added info about sellers (company name, number of table in the marketplace) as the archive comment, for example:
Code: Select all
PACKED & SCANNED FOR VIRUS BY AGNES
Gielda komputerowa
ul. Grzybowska 25, 1 pietro, stolik 30
Code: Select all
ÉÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ»
ş Packed by Wojciech Piegat ş
ş BEER SOFTWARE & HARDWARE ş
ş Gielda komputerowa, ul.Grzybowska 25 ş
ČÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍĽ
Few days ago I tried to focus on the problem. I compared few unpacked files from the CD with their equivalents, downlaoded from internet and I found out that they are different. Those diferences are bizarre, because it looks like some two-byte pairs were overwritten with other two-byte pairs and those regions of differences spans for only a few hundred byte blocks and almost always start on offsets ending with B8, for example
file: \README.EXE
size: 186868 bytes
differences only in region: $1AB8-1FFF
\DATA folder (it belongs to Smurf's teletransporter game - there are 2421 files, 211 are different, for example):
file: DATA\JEU_F\S01\S01C\S01C.MUX
size: 507429 bytes
differences only in region: $162B8-$167FF, $176B8-$19257
My questions
I firstly thought that bytes are only swapped and if I could know the algorithm, I would re-swap them back, but analyzing the histogram of byte occurences, it shows that the counts does not match. Anyway, I was wondering what could cause that? I have 3 hypotheses:
* Intentional burn of broken files - I'd rather doubt. As far as I can recall, after few weeks I returned to the seller, pointing at broken game and he burned it to the floppy for free. Unfortunatelly I don't quite remember how he explained to me his fault.
* Files were broken by the virus, present on the seller's computer, before burning CD
* The burning software, used by seller had intentional bug (or feature) that started to burn invalid data after shareware testing period elapsed. This seems rational to me even more because I probably read that somewhere, but do you know any DOS CD-burning software of that era (1997) that could suffer from that?
I attach the first sectors from image of that CD (just the lead-in and directory structure, without data) as well as one of the files that have swapped bytes.
Most CD burning programs write their "credits" in first sector, this one just looks like:
Code: Select all
CD001 CD-RTOS CD-BRIDGE
1997091514461500 1997091514461500 0000000000000000 0000000000000000
More funny, this CD is detected as CD-XA, while when you normally burn CD in Nero, it is CD-DA.
Additionally, one of the directories (\SCOOTER\EAKIDS\SCOOTCD\SAMPLES\) also seems to have "broken" entries, so it looks like either the burning software made some mess do it, or the whole CD-image was stored as a ISO file and something happened to it before burning.