pc-underground-doc

Measurements of Underground (PC, MS-DOS/Windows, Colors Arti Multimediali for Tecniche Nuove Multimedia, 1999) — an eight-player networked game about rats fighting for a sewer in the year 2500, on a CD-ROM that was burned with Nero, not pressed, of which two copies are known and this repository measures one.

Nothing was executed, no network was contacted, and no decoded asset is shipped with this repository. http://cdrom.tecnet.it/underground, which occurs exactly once in 141,996,032 bytes, is an artefact and was never opened.

The short sheet

the object	UNDERGROUND.ISO, 141,996,032 bytes = 69,334 sectors of 2,048
sha1	460e81c69869b8fd5a0de92017525ea87a0a2689
filesystem	ISO 9660 + Joliet, volume UNDERGROUND
publisher id	TECNICHE NUOVE
application id	NERO - BURNING ROM — a burned disc, not a pressing
burned	1999-11-15 11:06:00 GMT+01:00, 134 seconds after its newest file
the tree	148 files, 1 directory, 141,426,916 bytes = 99.5992 %
every byte	accounted for, remainder 0, with six controls that fire
the game	94.3230 % — the installer is 0.8268 %, DirectX 7.0 is 4.4477 %
the thesis	61.0193 % of this disc is 24.9167 seconds of rendered film
the executable	474,624 bytes, PE i386, Microsoft linker 5.0, 0.3343 %
the network	57 DPERR_ codes and no DPLAYX import — DirectPlay via COM
build paths	386 occurrences, 26 distinct, all under D:\3d\Maya\
protection	0 of 11 markers, over 5 MZ files of 148 (3.38 %)
crossings	0 of 143 distinct hashes against 70 repositories
the author	not one string, four names in pixels

The three things this disc has to say

One. The biggest file on it cannot be played from it. /INTRO.AVI is 78,345,766 bytes — 55.1746 % of the image — and lasts 12.25 seconds: 800×600 at 12 frames per second in Microsoft Video 1, which is 6,395,573 bytes per second, 51 Mbit/s, a sustained 41.6× CD-ROM. No drive sold in 1999 could serve it, and the installer copies it to the hard disk. A twelve-second shot of a rat in a sewer, at a data rate the medium could not carry, on a disc sold in Italian newsagents.

Two. The number eight does four jobs here, in six file formats that cannot see each other: eight factions, eight simultaneous players, eight lower rooms to conquer, and eight creatures per faction. It is in the readme's "un massimo di 8 giocatori", in eight letter-pairs of 3D Studio filenames, eight BARRA_, eight *FUR, eight *HEAD1, eight LIT_, eight BIG_ emblems, eight lines of FAZIONI.TXT, eight entries under FAZIONI / in MEMORIE.TXT, eight coloured bars on FAZ.BMP and eight chips sampled out of the main screen. They are the same eight, and MEMORIE.TXT names them: AZAZEL, BERON, CEZNAH, DREYA, EPATHYA, FI, GEBUREH, HESYOD. The one place the number is not eight is the save system, where the help text says eight, the art says six, and six one-byte .SAV files on the disc say who is right.

Three. Ivan Venturi occurs zero times as text, in ASCII and UTF-16, over every byte of every file. So do Fietta, Baruzzi, Avantaggiato, Venturi and Colors. And a 371 × 378 bitmap called INTRO_C.BMP, member 121 of 304 inside a 32-megabyte archive with no index of its contents, reads:

Ideato, diretto e prodotto da IVAN VENTURI · Programmazione NATALE FIETTA · Grafica, testi e sonoro IVAN VENTURI · Grafica 2D aggiuntiva TERENZIO AVANTAGGIATO, DANIELE BARUZZI

Four people, none of them a string. And one of the four is the man from whose personal archive this copy came — the disc credits its own donor.

Provenance

From the Internet Archive record, in the uploader's words: two different copies, a commercial one in ISO from Terenzio Avantaggiato's personal archive and another, possibly a beta, in BIN/CUE from Ivan Venturi's; both authorised publication. Dumped by Antonio Bellotta and Terenzio Avantaggiato, archived by Antonio "exa_starless" Bellotta and Yucali.

This repository measures the commercial ISO. The beta is not in this pipeline, and chapter 18 says what that costs.

The chapters

00 — Predictions	51 clauses written before the disc was opened, scored 44.0
01 — The object	what it is, who handed it over, and which denominator
02 — Technical sheet	every row with the command that reproduces it
03 — The volume	two namespaces, 142 case-only differences, one orphan
04 — The sectors	141,996,032 bytes accounted for, remainder zero
05 — The clocks	one instant written twice, two years of toolchain apart
06 — The movies	61 % of the disc, and a decoder checked against another
07 — BANK	30 % of the disc behind a four-byte magic
08 — The meshes	36 files, 15,436 triangles, and the map's topology
09 — The eight	one number in four roles, and how the game is built
10 — The executable	474 KB that speak DirectPlay to a dead address
11 — The installer	0.83 %, three files 16-bit, a copyright from 1990
12 — Names crossed	five sets, both directions, every miss inspected
13 — The author	zero strings, four names, one of them the donor
14 — Against the collection	zero shared bytes with anything
15 — Leftovers	5.6770 %, and six bytes that are save slots
16 — Personal data	two denominators kept apart
17 — Corrections	nine errors in the briefing and ten of my own
18 — What was not done	the gaps, named, with what each would cost
19 — Scorecard	the 51 clauses, scored, wrong ones left standing

The lists

• notes/sha1-all.txt — sha1, size, path, for all 148 files
• notes/manifest.tsv — sha1, size, extent, mtime, tz, path
• notes/sha1-iso.txt — the same, as iso9660.py emits it
• notes/bank-2d.txt — 304 members of 2D.DAT
• notes/bank-suoni.txt — 46 members of SUONI.DAT
• notes/namecross.txt — the five name sets, crossed
• notes/crossall.txt — 0 of 143, against 70 repositories
• notes/rooms.txt — the object names inside the 36 meshes, which are the only description of this game's map that exists

The tools

Written for this object: bank.py (the BANK reader, with --validate before --list), cram.py (a Microsoft Video 1 decoder, 147 of 147 chunks consumed to the byte), a3ds.py (a 3D Studio chunk reader, 36 of 36 trees closing), framediff.py (this decoder against another), isoaccount.py (every byte, remainder zero), twoclocks.py, locate.py (a count with an address), namecross.py, layoutbin.py, manifest.py, extractcheck.py, contactsheet.py, strregion.py.

Every one of them has a control that must fail, and --selftest runs it.