Caveman by Sam Moore Jr. - program I found

[digdugnate]

This thread is a continuation of the discussion from the 'Lubbock' thread about a program of my dad's that I had found among some miscellaneous disks. My aunt sent me a bunch of TI disks last year that my grandpa had of my dad's stuff. Confusing yet? lol

 

There were several of my dad's music programs, some 'disk fixed' retail games, and some ham radio stuff, but something unusual I found was an Assembly-coded game called 'Caveman'. Just as a sanity check, I verified against GameBase that this wasn't a game that he had 'co-opted' and tweaked, like Cars and Carcasses II or Swords & Sorcery.

 

I was probably only 5-6 when he was actively working on this, so I don't have much memory of it at all, other than I'm pretty sure he had taken the movie with Ringo Starr as inspiration. I'm not even sure if the game was completed, as it seems to be a little buggy- when I died on the scorpion level and started over, the game crashed.

 

Attached below are the screen shots I was able to grab. I just have my TI and the PEB, but not really any way here to transfer TI files to a Windows computer since I don't have a Lotharek or TiPI/etc.

 

I tried a couple of ways just for grins to see if I could 'peek' at the source code of the game, but as shown in the screenshots, when I try to print to a file and edit or edit the file itself the error given is 'CONTROL CHARACTER REMOVED'. If you press 'Enter' and look, it's all gibberish. My suspicion is that the code is assembled and obfuscated somehow, but I just haven't spent any real time looking through my EA manual yet.

 

So.. enjoy! I hope this sparks some discussion. I'd love to hear what more knowledgeable folks think at first glance.

 

I can make copies of the TI disk for folks, but unfortunately that's the most I could do at this juncture with what equipment I have.

 

 

[+mizapf]

No obfuscation. The CONTROL CHARACTER REMOVED message is shown whenever you tried to load a DIS/FIX 80 object code that was assembled with the C option (compression). In that case, the bytes were included between the tags (B) in binary, instead of being shown in ASCII. For example, when you have the word CAVE, probably with a leading length byte (04), in compressed mode you get "B . C B A V B E B" (the B are tags; remove them to read CAVE), and the 04 byte before C would be dropped by the loader of the Editor with the above message. In normal mode, it would be "B 04 43 B 41 56 B 45 32".

[digdugnate]

ah, ok! I haven't spent a lot of time reading up on this, so obviously i'm not going to know what i'm talking about, lol. if i use Disk Manager, the program is listed as a DIS/FIX 80 file.

 

is there a way to disassemble/decompress?

[+mizapf]

As I just read, you don't have a good way to bring stuff to your PC. Maybe via serial connection and TELCO?

 

Or you can disassemble the file on the TI using the DISkASSEMBLER.

[digdugnate]

thanks! ill check this out.

[+Ksarul]

Whatever you do--please make sure all of your experimentation is done on a copy of the file transferred to a different disk, as you really don't want to lose the original. . .

[digdugnate]

Already thought of :-)

[digdugnate]

thanks to @twoodland here's the EA3 version of the program if anyone would like it

CAVEMAN.zip