[HN Gopher] Does this 8088 code in the Leisure Suit Larry 2 game...
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Does this 8088 code in the Leisure Suit Larry 2 game do anything?
Author : Luc
Score : 292 points
Date : 2024-02-27 21:18 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (retrocomputing.stackexchange.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (retrocomputing.stackexchange.com)
| b800h wrote:
| No-one in the comments there seems to have twigged that OBEAh is
| simultaneously a hex address and a word for JuJu, magic. Which I
| suppose is appropriate in the context of a tribal initiation?
| shzhdbi09gv8ioi wrote:
| "Someone" pointed that out about the same time as your comment
| here.
|
| Also, it is by coincidence as seen in the COMMAND.COM
| disassembly which would be the correct answer.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| While I don't know if this is really true, but there was a time
| when chips like the 8080 ran at a speed that was close to AM
| frequencies. Programmers figured out that certain patterns
| produced sounds on their radio. So they would insert garbage code
| that accessed the address bus at the right speeds.
|
| Perhaps this is something along those lines?
| duskwuff wrote:
| I think you've misinterpreted the question pretty wildly. The
| code in question is in the game _as text displayed on screen_ ,
| not as part of the executable.
|
| Besides, IBM PC-compatible systems already had a reliable way
| of making basic sounds - the PC speaker. There was no need for
| the techniques you're describing on that platform.
| notfish wrote:
| I think you've misunderstood the personality of hackers if
| you think they would make chips play sounds via radio
| _because it was useful_
| colechristensen wrote:
| I saw demos of this at either blackhat or defcon, various
| methods to exfiltrate data by bitbanging pins, running
| garbage code, or otherwise triggering hardware or
| peripherals to generate unintended radio signals to be
| picked up at a distance.
|
| I'm pretty sure I've heard of old games doing this for fun
| too.
| fragmede wrote:
| Van eck phreaking is some crazy stuff!
| gerdesj wrote:
| Where in the article does it say "the code in question ... is
| displayed on screen"?
|
| I've read it a few times (half-heartedly) and then just to be
| sure (quite a few glasses of wine consumed already) I did a
| search for the word "screen" - nope, but not exactly
| conclusive.
|
| There are several theories espoused but one comment is: "In a
| brief email conversation with Al Lowe ... he probably used
| the COMMAND.COM file as the basis for this code ..."
|
| Your assertion about "reliable way of making basic sounds" is
| sort of true, if you ignore the shonky hardware that used to
| and get shipped as a "speaker". It's better nowadays and
| largely an anachronism. Back in the day you'd wedge a
| Soundblaster into an ISA slot along with some reasonable
| speakers or really good headphones and job done.
|
| Your parent may be thinking of the silly games that used to
| be played with big old Winchester discs on big IDM gear and
| the like.
| jerf wrote:
| "Where in the article does it say "the code in question ...
| is displayed on screen"?"
|
| Nowhere. It is shown in the animation posted in the
| article, which you may have not noticed was animated if
| your eyes jumped over it quickly enough.
| bitwize wrote:
| Somewhere between the Sound Blaster and using RF leakage in
| the AM band to generate sound was the Covox Speech Thing,
| which used the pins from your parallel port and a resistor
| ladder to generate PCM sound. You could solder one together
| yourself. Some games supported it, and Disney marketed an
| improved version with a built-in speaker and powered
| amplifier as the Disney Sound Source.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > Where in the article does it say "the code in question
| ... is displayed on screen"?
|
| As someone else mentioned, it shows up in the GIF
| animation, about 45 seconds in, as a sequence of text
| boxes.
|
| https://i.stack.imgur.com/8Aznd.gif
|
| > Your assertion about "reliable way of making basic
| sounds" is sort of true, if you ignore the shonky hardware
| that used to and get shipped as a "speaker".
|
| On the IBM PC, one of the channels on the PIT (programmable
| interval timer) was hooked up to a speaker. It didn't sound
| great, but it could at least make simple tones on its own,
| and even music, without sucking up too much CPU time:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IOL4q5tDDQ
|
| The Apple II had it much worse. It had a built-in speaker
| as well, but no timers -- the speaker was connected
| directly to the memory address $C030, such that performing
| a read or write operation on that address would toggle the
| state of the speaker (on/off). Playing a tone required the
| CPU to hit that address in an appropriately sized loop;
| since the CPU wasn't particularly fast to begin with, it
| was nearly impossible to play audio while anything else was
| going on.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| > Where in the article does it say "the code in question
| ... is displayed on screen"?
|
| The post says "there's a part in the game where the main
| character (Larry) has to write a program in 8088 assembly
| language as part of his tribal initiation. [...] _The code
| shown in the game is:_ "
|
| Emphasis mine.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Just last week I spent a few hours using an AM radio to better
| understand what a locked-up i.MX7 processor was doing.
| (Unsuccessfully, but it was fun trying.)
| SomeoneFromCA wrote:
| You may try FM too. I used this technique with AVRs. It was
| midly useful, as reading from eeprom produced distinct sound.
| titzer wrote:
| In college I had a PC with a 100Mhz bus. One day I was
| defragging the hard disk-- _as one did in those days_ --and by
| chance had the PC case cover off and also the FM radio on. As I
| swept past 100Mhz I picked up the unmistakable _KKSSHH CHKS
| CHKS CHKS_ coming from the data going over the bus. For a
| minute or two I thought the NSA bugged me.
| mjevans wrote:
| Wow... that explains 90mhz and 133mhz chips as targets and
| bases for front side busses.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > in college
|
| At Caltech some students would see how bright an LED could
| get if you immersed it in a liquid nitrogen bath.
|
| There was always something fun going on.
| anthk wrote:
| Try compiling and running tempest for Eliza if you have a
| nearby linux/bsd machine.
| westmeal wrote:
| I have an old thinkpad x200 that I can hear operating over an
| AM radio close enough to the laptop but I have a feeling I'm
| hearing something else besides the CPU because the CPU would
| run too fast... right?
| sedatk wrote:
| Somebody in the answers already figured out that the code
| belonged to MS-DOS 3.30 COMMAND.COM as previously attested by Al
| Lowe. https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/29580/3986
| jojobas wrote:
| Yet the top answer is "this is gibberish". Go figure.
| spurgu wrote:
| Well the top answer was written 3 days ago, the correct one 3
| _hours_ ago. Give it some time.
| tylersmith wrote:
| It was just as confidently incorrect then as it is now.
| MiguelX413 wrote:
| I agree, why did they even say it if it was never
| correct?
| saagarjha wrote:
| It looks correct to me?
| MiguelX413 wrote:
| Well it wasn't, as established by the parent parent
| parent ... comment.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I disagree with it.
| MiguelX413 wrote:
| You disagree that the code belonged to MS-DOS 3.30
| COMMAND.COM?
| moron4hire wrote:
| Welcome to StackExchange?
| kragen wrote:
| well, it sort of is gibberish. it starts in the middle of a
| system call, omitting to state not only the system call's
| arguments but even which system call to invoke; that's no way
| to write a program
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yeah
|
| The code is not gibberish, but the way it was put there,
| missing information, etc, makes it so
| kragen wrote:
| yeah, exactly
| vkaku wrote:
| Go and upvote the real answer below that one.
| nicetryguy wrote:
| > Yet the top answer is "this is gibberish"
|
| They're not wrong really. It is gibberish on it's own. We
| don't know where in memory that it starts or the places it is
| referencing in the jumps. If it were ASM source code those
| jumps would likely contain labels instead of just raw dogging
| memory locations.
|
| The fact that it just so happens to be from COMMAND.COM from
| MS-DOS 3 is a wonderful bit of detective work, but it doesn't
| make the snippet any less gibberish.
| SomeoneFromCA wrote:
| No it is not "gibberish". Gibberish would be a stream of
| invalid opcodes, zeros and FFs. The code is incomplete,
| true, but it easily deducable what it is doing. The only
| thing that looks strange is IRET, but not entirely
| misplaced.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| By that definition, any language I don't speak is
| gibberish, and yet if someone asked me "what does 'Je n'ai
| pas mange depuis six jours' mean", replying that it's
| gibberish is obviously wrong.
| deanishe wrote:
| Seems to me, your comment presumes a certain completeness
| on the part of the utterance/code snippet that isn't
| necessarily given.
| n6h6 wrote:
| That's not really a good comparison, no. The code snippet
| is more comparable to a sentence fragment, which more
| often than not is "gibberish".
|
| For example, taken out of its original context, this
| sentence fragment from your comment is meaningless:
|
| "that definition, any language"
| tetha wrote:
| Isn't it stack overflow wisdom by now to always look for the
| second or third answer?
| SomeoneFromCA wrote:
| It is not on stackoverflow.
| pwdisswordfishc wrote:
| It's the same perverse FGITW mechanics though. Worse
| even, given that the RC site did not implement the change
| of unpinning accepted answers. Also it's regularly
| subject to herd voting from Hot Network Questions
| visitors.
| alecco wrote:
| And likely will remain the "accepted" answer, unless who made
| the question comes bothers to come back to it.
|
| This is a huge problem with SO, the person making the
| question is not usually the most qualified to decide and they
| usually won't come back to check for further answers.
|
| One of many reasons I stopped answering a long time ago.
| pwdisswordfishc wrote:
| Actually, the best answer was written by the question
| poster himself. Who is probably _still_ not going to mark
| it as accepted out of a misguided sense of politeness.
| tejohnso wrote:
| They said they don't think their answer is best because
| the question was "What does it do" not, "Where is it
| from".
| pwdisswordfishc wrote:
| That's an excuse. The real reason is to avoid drama by
| withdrawing Internet points. Some people can be very
| salty about this.
| bdhcuidbebe wrote:
| well lets see what happens when they train a llm on all
| this "knowledge".. oh wait
| shawn_w wrote:
| That's why "accepted answer" isn't supposed to be treated
| as "best answer", but just "answer that helped the asker"
| (and, yeah, often it's the blind leading the blind).
|
| IIRC they recently changed the default sorting of answers
| to not always put the accepted one first to try to help
| with that common misconception.
| carimura wrote:
| exactly. the best answer way down there.
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| It was DOS then. Not eunuchs. How disappointing.
| romwell wrote:
| >It was DOS then. Not eunuchs. How disappointing.
|
| It was sufficiently eunuchs-like for the time.
| epcoa wrote:
| Not just "somebody", the original questioner posted that
| answer. Someone suggested they auto accept and they declined as
| they felt the answer they accepted answered their original
| question better (what it does, not where it is from).
|
| So there is no unfairness here. Put your pitch forks down.
| bombcar wrote:
| > Comments have been moved to chat; please do not continue the
| discussion here. Before posting a comment below this one, please
| review the purposes of comments. Comments that do not request
| clarification or suggest improvements usually belong as an
| answer, on Retrocomputing Meta, or in Retrocomputing Chat.
| Comments continuing discussion may be removed.
|
| And this is how useful sites die.
| myself248 wrote:
| Stackexchange's karma policy has effectively kept this 39-year
| veteran of computing from contributing so much as a word. I'm
| okay jumping through a hoop or two to prove I'm not a bot, but
| I never figured out how to earn enough points to comment
| without being able to comment. This is how useful sites die.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > I never figured out how to earn enough points to comment
|
| By posting questions or answers, especially ones which get
| upvoted.
|
| Comments are, intentionally, treated as lower value by the
| site. They're intended for discussing and correcting issues
| which may exist with a question or answer, not for revealing
| new information.
| cellularmitosis wrote:
| I'll echo OP's frustration / lament. I have domain
| expertise in a specific platform, and it is pretty common
| that I'll see an answer which could use some clarification
| or additional detail about edge cases to consider. However,
| 1) I never ask questions on SO, and 2) I don't have time to
| wade through unanswered questions. As a result, though I
| would like to give them free labor by adding useful
| comments, I will never be able to.
|
| The point is that SO is missing out here.
| o11c wrote:
| If you feel you can improve an answer, you can always
| just add your own answer. That should quickly give you
| enough to comment.
| apaprocki wrote:
| It feels wrong and an anti-pattern to copy-paste a 98%
| subjectively correct answer as your own, just to sprinkle
| the 2% (again, subjectively) that it was missing to be
| the Answer.
|
| Why can't we highlight specific content and create a
| discussion thread hinged off the highlighted part?
|
| Creating a properly written, end-to-end answer for a
| complex question is an heroic task if all you wanted to
| point out was that there was a demonstrably better way to
| do Item 15(a)(5)(iii) and the author missed it.
|
| It's funny that we, collectively as programmers, use git
| all day long to solve this problem for modifying discrete
| blocks of programming language text with discussion and
| more, but can't seem to ever apply the same tools and
| fascination to written English.
|
| Even more interesting now that we use the best answers to
| train models. You'd think there would be more discipline
| involved in making the best answer even bestier. (Like,
| say, Wikipedia)
| DANmode wrote:
| The unique offering of their platform, for better and for
| worse, is not having to "go through" the discussion of
| why the best answer is the best - you just get right to
| the best, complete answer.
| lewispollard wrote:
| That would be great if it worked like that, but for the
| same reasons that the parent comments lamented about, it
| rarely does. Often the answer marked "correct" isn't as
| correct as something in a comment or another answer.
| duskwuff wrote:
| IIRC, you can also propose edits to existing answers, and
| having those edits accepted will give you a bit of
| reputation too.
| o11c wrote:
| Suggested edits still require a bit of karma. Questions
| and answers are the only things new users can do.
|
| ... though note also that once you get karma on one site
| you get some base karma on all sites.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > Suggested edits still require a bit of karma.
|
| You only need reputation to have your edits applied
| immediately, without review. You can suggest edits at any
| rep level (even while logged out).
| dspillett wrote:
| If you can improve an answer, you could always give a new
| answer?
|
| _> The point is that SO is missing out here._
|
| Unfortunately, if comments were open to all initially the
| site would quickly fill with "me too" comments and other
| things that would fill the page with low quality content
| that would be effort to moderate. This already happens to
| an extent with answers.
|
| My point being that the potential gain from automatically
| open comments may be less than the potential hassle from
| less useful users. Balancing these matters is difficult,
| many places get it even more wrong than SO and related
| sites do, and there is probably no perfect answer that
| doesn't put off some useful contributions.
| o11c wrote:
| Other things about comments:
|
| You don't need karma to comment on your own
| questions/answers (i.e. in reply to someone else's comment
| on what you posted).
|
| Basically anyone can flag comments obsolete and this can
| make them be deleted without review.
|
| My last comment was "this code breaks for obscure input X"
| but I can no longer locate it.
|
| The real main problem with StackOverflow is that all the
| easy questions have already been asked and answered, and
| all the hard questions get little attention, so it's hard
| to get karma honestly. Many people have luck operating in
| obscure language tags.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| The Internet is shit now, swarmed by bots (even ones some
| people argue are sentient). Useful sites are less possible
| than before.
|
| You _are_ too late.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| We should call this Redditification
| Etheryte wrote:
| Especially so given that if you read through all the moved
| comments, you can see that they actually end up uncovering
| where the code originated from. So in short, the actual correct
| answer to the question was found in the comments and then the
| moderator decided to move those comments away.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| At least this chat page is live. Often, IME, the linked chat
| page is not found (as in, requests return a 404). What a mess.
| wruza wrote:
| I'm using SO occasionally and was actively participating in
| 201x-ish. Even then people cried SO was over, but I never felt
| that. Comments were moved to the chat, well, then I click on a
| link and read them. It's not any different from clicking on
| expand-comments link. Excuse me if I'm getting something wrong
| here, but to me it feels like a good thing to keep such drama
| from a site.
|
| That said, sometimes moderators could lock questions which were
| different from where they redirected to _and_ insist that's
| correct. This was one of the worst issues, imo.
| pwdisswordfishc wrote:
| By enforcing quality standards?
| esafak wrote:
| I love that games used to have jokes like this, and that someone
| was able to ask this question three decades later and get an
| answer from the author. I'm only sad I didn't get this far in the
| game!
| malkia wrote:
| From Ralphs Interrupt List, INT 21H with AH=4D ->
|
| https://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/rbinter/id/88/29.html
|
| INT 21 - DOS 2+ - GET RETURN CODE (ERRORLEVEL)
|
| more in the link above. That took me like 30+ years ago back ;)
| pwdisswordfishc wrote:
| It's mentioned in one of the answers. With a much better-
| formatted RBIL edition linked.
| malkia wrote:
| Should I be concerned?
| lordnacho wrote:
| A bit like how Lorem Ipsum looks like Latin if you didn't learn
| any in school.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| It's corrupted Latin. It's mostly taken from a book by Cicero.
| GTP wrote:
| Was Eunuchs, an OS that runs only on 8088 CPUs, a joking
| reference to Linux?
| dhosek wrote:
| Um, not sure if you're joking or just young, but you _have_
| heard of this thing called Unix, right?
| GTP wrote:
| Yes, I know about it, it's just that Linux come first to mind
| due to all the early discussions about it being Torvalds' toy
| project. Plus I assumed Unix supported also other
| architectures, given how much variety there was in the early
| days.
| dhosek wrote:
| Leisure Suit Larry predates Linux by quite a bit (as I
| recall the first 8-bit versions of the game came out in the
| early 80s). As for Unix, in the olden days there were a
| _lot_ of Unix variations (so there was a tendency to refer
| to _ix as a generic term for all the variations) running on
| any platform that was at least 16-bit (I don't_ think*
| there were ever any 8-bit Unix variations, but I could be
| wrong).
| gattilorenz wrote:
| Also, an 8088 cannot run Linux (but it can ran ELKS, which
| at least has "Linux" in the acronym), while there were a
| few Unices for 8086-class CPUs - with SCO Xenix being
| probably the most functional of them all.
| zenexer wrote:
| Neither. It's a play on "Unix."
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| LSL2 was released in 1988. The first Linux kernel release was
| in 1991 and required an 80386 or later.
| fasa99 wrote:
| So LSL2 came out in 1988, Linux in 1991, so definitely NOT a
| reference to Linux. However both the game and Linux are a
| reference to Unix (Bell Labs, released in 1970s). The LSL2
| developers clearly knew about Unix. And the play on word
| "Eunuchs / Unix" is a reversal of the pun of the original Unix
| i.e. the authors of Unix were themselves making a pun on the
| word "Eunuchs". Here, what Unix was "castrating" was an even
| earlier (1960s?) operating system called Multics developed by
| Ken Thompson, who got frustrated by all the bloat and
| complexity, so sought to castrate down the complexity by
| writing the now famous Unix, whose paradigm spread far and wide
| and was re-implemented in Linux.
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