When the EXE contains parts of the game

[Minello]

Hello.
I have been fiddling around with some executable files. I noticed that "Future Wars" and "Cruise for a corpse" have some text in their executables that is used in the game, at least in the Amiga versions.
I looked into various versions of the "Cruise for a corpse" executable and saw that it always contains the verbs and the saving/loading dialogs. What varies from language to language is the presence or absence of the "default answers" such as "It doesn't work" or "It's not important". These bits of text are equally spaced and the empty space is stuffed with zeroes, so they're easy to alter. I tryed doing so and it worked (tested with WinUAE).
How do you support these games without their executables?

[LordHoto]

Looking at the CruisE source code it seems some versions contain some strings in a file called "DELPHINE.LNG", for versions without that file, there are strings in the source code. Those hard coded strings only exist for English and French though.

Code: Select all

const char *englishLanguageStrings[13] = {
	"Pause", NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, "Inventory", "Speak about...", "Player Menu", NULL,
	"Save", "Load", "Start Again", "Quit"
};

Is the entry for the English version for example. Of course so far we only support the DOS version AFAIK, so the Amiga version, which you seem to be talking about, might handle it differently. Especially I can't find any string "It doesn't work" in our source code, so I guess that's in the data files in the DOS version.

[Bobbin]

How do you support these games without their executables?

Afaik these informations are stored in the dat files, such as kyra.dat.

[Minello]

Whoops! I actually meant "Operation Stealth", not "Cruise for a corpse", sorry!