Dark Seed - gribbet

Dark Seed platform comparison

Document status:: OK (unpolished)
Last major revision:: 2025-04-04

Contains details about file formats used in the various ports:

The front matter includes a table summarising how each port finds its resources.

Unprocessed

These notes aren't ready for publication, really. They have my silly temporary names that I use while I'm figuring things out. They're very uncertain. Many of them don't even have sentences and capital letters.

I initially put them out as an early-access preview because sometimes that raw information now is better than waiting for a better version later.

I leave them up because they're kind of a record of thoughts I had on the way, and that might be interesting to someone (perhaps myself later).

An investigation log that shows some of my thought process early on when I was looking at just the DOS resource files, ignoring the code.
A document I just called morgles. A raw mixture of:
- Overview of how the programs (DS.BAT, START.EXE, TOS.EXE) run each other and when
- Art files: IMG and ANM
- Sprites and objects
Even raw-er notes about code and run-time data structures. Contains information about how parts of a room (.ROM) file are processed.

Then there are what amounts to giving names to numbers.

A very incomplete list of object IDs used in the game.
A list of locations that I considered functions in my analysis
A list of locations that I considered strings in my analysis
A list of other locations I found in my analysis
A list of comments I attached to locations, sometimes just showing the expanded text of a string number
A list of offsets into the "data segment" that I found used in the code

And if you happen to be using the same tool that I used, or just want to check, here's my radare2 project script in the state I left it when I wandered away from my analysis.