From: stu...@aol.com (Stu042)
Subject: Copying Infocom games
Date: 1997/07/23
Message-ID: < 19970723190201.PAA07814@ladder01.news.aol.com>#1/1
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I own LTOI 1 + 2 (both CD versions), and I was wondering how
legal/acceptable it would be to obtain copies of newer versions of the
games on them, e.g. AMFV release 79, Sorcerer release 18, Wishbringer
Solid Gold, and Zork Solid Gold. Would it be foul piracy or not?
Stu
From: jcom...@typhoon.xnet.com (Jason Compton)
Subject: Re: Copying Infocom games
Date: 1997/07/24
Message-ID: <5r6p8p$v3@flood.xnet.com>#1/1
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Organization: XNet - Chicagoland's Regional ISP (630) 983-6064
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Stu042 (stu...@aol.com) wrote:
: I own LTOI 1 + 2 (both CD versions), and I was wondering how
: legal/acceptable it would be to obtain copies of newer versions of the
: games on them, e.g. AMFV release 79, Sorcerer release 18, Wishbringer
: Solid Gold, and Zork Solid Gold. Would it be foul piracy or not?
This is the sort of thing you could agonize over for hours with a license
agreement and a fine toothed comb, but if you're taking a vote on
morality, my vote is that it's legitimate to do so. There have been lots
of speculations and ponderings as to why the versions that are on LTOI and
Masterpieces are there, and it would seem that the most reasonable answer
is "that's because that's what they could find." You've paid your dues
for the programs, it seems only right that you should be able to use the
revisions you see fit. (We're not talking about something they're
charging upgrade fees for, here...)
--
Jason Compton jcom...@xnet.com
Editor-in-Chief, Amiga Report Magazine Anchor, Amiga Legacy
http://www.cucug.org/ar/ http://www.xnet.com/~jcompton/
Move forward... ...was my friend's only cry
From: stu...@aol.com (Stu042)
Subject: Re: Copying Infocom games
Date: 1997/07/29
Message-ID: <19970729111201.HAA22166@ladder02.news.aol.com>#1/1
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Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
In article <5r6p8p$v...@flood.xnet.com>, jcom...@typhoon.xnet.com (Jason
Compton) writes:
>Stu042 (stu...@aol.com) wrote:
>: I own LTOI 1 + 2 (both CD versions), and I was wondering how
>: legal/acceptable it would be to obtain copies of newer versions of the
>: games on them, e.g. AMFV release 79, Sorcerer release 18, Wishbringer
>: Solid Gold, and Zork Solid Gold. Would it be foul piracy or not?
>
>This is the sort of thing you could agonize over for hours with a license
>agreement and a fine toothed comb, but if you're taking a vote on
>morality, my vote is that it's legitimate to do so. There have been lots
>of speculations and ponderings as to why the versions that are on LTOI
and
>Masterpieces are there, and it would seem that the most reasonable answer
>is "that's because that's what they could find." You've paid your dues
>for the programs, it seems only right that you should be able to use the
>revisions you see fit. (We're not talking about something they're
>charging upgrade fees for, here...)
Ok, thanks... now the question is, where do I get them from? A quick
search on Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves turned up nothing, and I doubt they'll
be in any of the C64 archives I read about somewhere (the newest versions,
that is). If anyone would like to mail me them, feel free to contact me
privately (I can scan in pages from the LTOI manuals or make screen grabs
if you need 'proof of purchase'). Cheers,
Stu
From: stu...@aol.com (Stu042)
Subject: Re: Copying Infocom games
Date: 1997/08/12
Message-ID: <19970812115401.HAA01890@ladder02.news.aol.com>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 263889781
References: <19970729111201.HAA22166@ladder02.news.aol.com>
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Organization: AOL, http://www.aol.co.uk
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In article <19970729111...@ladder02.news.aol.com>, stu...@aol.com
(Stu042) writes:
>In article < 5r6p8p$v...@flood.xnet.com>, jcom...@typhoon.xnet.com (Jason
>Compton) writes:
>
>>Stu042 (stu...@aol.com) wrote:
>>: I own LTOI 1 + 2 (both CD versions), and I was wondering how
>>: legal/acceptable it would be to obtain copies of newer versions of the
>>: games on them, e.g. AMFV release 79, Sorcerer release 18, Wishbringer
>>: Solid Gold, and Zork Solid Gold. Would it be foul piracy or not?
>>
>>This is the sort of thing you could agonize over for hours with a
license
>>agreement and a fine toothed comb, but if you're taking a vote on
>>morality, my vote is that it's legitimate to do so. There have been
lots
>>of speculations and ponderings as to why the versions that are on LTOI
>and
>>Masterpieces are there, and it would seem that the most reasonable
answer
>>is "that's because that's what they could find." You've paid your dues
>>for the programs, it seems only right that you should be able to use the
>>revisions you see fit. (We're not talking about something they're
>>charging upgrade fees for, here...)
>
>Ok, thanks... now the question is, where do I get them from? A quick
>search on Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves turned up nothing, and I doubt
they'll
>be in any of the C64 archives I read about somewhere (the newest
versions,
>that is). If anyone would like to mail me them, feel free to contact me
>privately (I can scan in pages from the LTOI manuals or make screen grabs
>if you need 'proof of purchase'). Cheers,
>
>Stu
Please could someone respond? Even a 'no' would be better than hearing
nothing at all. Some sort of patch (like the Lurking Horror/Sherlock sound
patches which update older, sound-less versions to newer ones) would be
even better than a copy of the whole thing -- no chance of them 'falling
into the wrong hands', as it were, and they could maybe be archived at
gmd. I'm assuming that it's ok to obtain newer versions -- I only received
one positive response, and no negative ones
Stu
From: Al Petrofsky <alba...@wco.com>
Subject: Making old versions of Infocom games publicly available as xor patches
Date: 1997/08/14
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<19970813183801.OAA15447@ladder02.news.aol.com>
<19970812115401.HAA01890@ladder02.news.aol.com>
Followup-To: rec.games.int-fiction
Organization: The Vegetable Liberation Front
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction,rec.arts.int-fiction
[This article combines two threads in rec.games.int-fiction. It also
crossposts to rec.arts.int-fiction because the content gets somewhat
technical and includes a plea for volunteers with C compilers, which
are more likely to be found in r.a.i-f.]
In the rec.games.int-fiction thread "Copying Infocom games",
stu...@aol.com (Stu042) writes, as part of a plea for old versions of games:
>
>Please could someone respond? Even a 'no' would be better than hearing
>nothing at all. Some sort of patch (like the Lurking Horror/Sherlock sound
>patches which update older, sound-less versions to newer ones) would be
>even better than a copy of the whole thing -- no chance of them 'falling
>into the wrong hands', as it were, and they could maybe be archived at
>gmd. I'm assuming that it's ok to obtain newer versions -- I only received
>one positive response, and no negative ones
Meanwhile, in the "New Zork text adventure from Marc Blank / NG
Magazine Ad" thread, graem...@aol.com (GraemeCree) writes:
>
>Okay, here's a question. I'd like
>to be able to give people copies of the first version of Zork 1 (Version
>5) because it has so many amusing bugs that appear nowhere else. I'd also
>like to give out the Solid Gold edition of the game with online hints,
>because Activision hasn't been using it in their releases. If the game is
>Freeware, does this mean that I can do it?
I respond no, regardless of whether Zork 1 meets any particular
definition of "Freeware", but suggest he distribute an xor file as
Stephen Jokisch did in 1995 for a sound version of Lurking Horror,
about which Activision has not complained and seems unlikely ever to
do so.
graem...@aol.com (GraemeCree) then writes:
> Okay, I'll look into that, but I think it may be more involved in
> this case. My understanding of Lurking Horror, is that the game portion
> of the datafile was virtually unchanged, and that sound support was tacked
> on. In this case, many responses within the game itself may be changed,
> and of course, with the Solid Gold version, the entire hintbook portion
> would have to be added whole.
And now, the actual original content of this article:
The extent of the changes is irrelevant when making a bitwise
exclusive or (xor). It would matter if we were trying to make a
compact patch file, but we're not. The xor file will be the full
length of the longer of the two versions, regardless of how much or
little they differ. We don't care, we're just trying to make the
result usable by people who already have one version and unusable by
others. This is accomplished by essentially encrypting one version
using the other version as the password.
It is true that the last N bytes of the xor file, where N is the
difference in length of the two versions, will be unencrypted.
Z-machine hackers will probably be able to decode some z-strings from
this portion, but that hardly seems an issue.
In the case of the Lurking Horror, the widespread version (release
203) has length 128986. The sound version (release 221) has length
129944. Only 6511 bytes are the same in both versions. The xor file
(lurking.cnv in
ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/infocom/missing-files/lhsound.zip) is
129944 bytes long. The last 958 bytes (= 129944 - 128986) of the xor
file are identical to the last 958 bytes of the sound version.
Included below is C source code for a very simple xor program, similar
to the one Jokisch included with lhsound.zip, but simpler and more
general. You could use it to create an xor file of zork1 releases 5
and 88 by running:
xor zork1r5.dat zork1r88.dat r5r88.xor
If you gave the xor file to people with release 88, they could
recreate release 5 by running:
xor zork1r88.dat r5r88.xor zork1r5.dat
Because of the simple way the program deals with differences in file
lengths, the reconstituted zork1r5.dat file would have extra zeros at
the end. Fortunately, Z-machine interpreters just ignore this. If
desired, the file could be trimmed back down to minimal size using the
"check" program from Mark Howell's ztools.
If you can't compile this program, you can mail me the release 5 data
file and I'll be happy to generate the xor file and post it to gmd.
Maybe someone will volunteer to make dos and mac binaries of this
program (I don't have access to a compiler for either). If there's
sufficient interest, perhaps this would best be rolled into the ztools
package.
-al
/* xor.c
*
* Read two files and output the bytewise xor. If the files are of
* unequal length, act as if the shorter one were zero-padded to the
* length of the longer one.
*
* This is sometimes useful for creating and applying "patch" files
* between two versions of copyrighted binaries. Unlike a typical
* "diff" patch file, there is no space savings compared to just
* sending out the whole file. Instead, the point is that the patch
* is usable by people who already have one version, but useless to
* others, and can therefore be freely distributed without upsetting
* the copyright holder (in some cases... certainly not if the
* copyright holder is currently selling an upgrade from one version
* to the other).
*
* In particular, this program was written with Infocom Z-machine
* binaries in mind. These files have their length encoded within
* them and extra nulls at the end are ignored, which is why we can
* get by without some scheme to encode the length of the shorter file
* in the output file (which would really screw up the simplicity of
* this thing).
*
* Written in 1997 by Alabama Petrofsky
* and released into the public domain (which means you're free to do
* anything with it, even remove this sentence).
*/
#include
void xor_die(char *s)
{
perror(s);
exit(1);
}
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
FILE *source1 = NULL;
FILE *source2 = NULL;
FILE *dest = NULL;
int source1_byte, source2_byte, source1_eof, source2_eof;
if ((argc != 3) && (argc != 4)) {
fprintf(stderr, "Usage: %s file1 file2 [output_file]\n", argv[0]);
exit(1);
}
if ((source1 = fopen(argv[1], "rb")) == NULL)
xor_die("cannot open first source file");
if ((source2 = fopen(argv[2], "rb")) == NULL)
xor_die("cannot open second source file");
if (argc == 4) {
if ((dest = fopen(argv[3], "wb")) == NULL)
xor_die("cannot open output file");
} else {
dest = stdout;
}
for (source1_eof = 0, source2_eof = 0;;) {
if (!source1_eof) {
if ((source1_byte = getc(source1)) == EOF) {
source1_byte = 0;
source1_eof = 1;
}
}
if (!source2_eof) {
if ((source2_byte = getc(source2)) == EOF) {
source2_byte = 0;
source2_eof = 1;
}
}
if (source1_eof && source2_eof)
break;
putc(source1_byte ^ source2_byte, dest);
}
exit(0);
}