3do-aloneinthedark-doc

Alone in the Dark, 3DO, Europe, English and French — a port of the 1992 Infogrames MS-DOS game, published on this platform by Interplay, pressed 1994-12-19 by the disc's own clock. One CHD, 214,324,863 bytes, one MODE1_RAW track, no audio track.

It is the first 3DO disc in five whose sector map does not close, and 14.83 % of it is two other computers.

The short card

pressing	192,811 sectors, 57.9012 % of a 74-minute CD
user area	394,876,928 bytes — the denominator every figure here uses
file system	Opera. 251 files, 14 directories, 360,246,461 bytes, 231 distinct SHA-1
root directory	five blocks, seven copies, layout 1 + 4 + 2 — a fifth arrangement
sector map	it does not close: iamaduck 0, owned by nothing 16,689 = 8.6556 %
every sector	sync, address, EDC, ECC P and ECC Q correct on 192,811 of 192,811
recorded sound	77.1890 % of the user area, 2 h 28 m 37 s, in three encodings
identified	90.7863 %, from the 49.0016 % this session started with
not derived	0.4437 %, twenty files, all of them named
binaries	41 ARM images, entry 0x100 on 41 of 41, five compressed, all the SDK's
pictures	149 camera backgrounds 320 × 250, ten full-screen 16-bit screens, 7 real cels
archives	20 .PAK, 2,072 members — PKZIP with the headers rewritten
against the neighbours	/System 116 of 116 byte-identical with Super Street Fighter II Turbo, zero changed

The two findings

Thirty-four megabytes of a PC. Sectors 176,147–192,810 belong to no file and hold a Watcom C/C++ Version 10.0 installation — the compiler, its manuals, its libraries, DOS/4GW, Phar Lap, IBM's SOM toolkit, 2,894 distinct filenames and the build tree of the machine Watcom's own C++ library was compiled on. It is on the pressing, proved at the sector; it is one contiguous object, proved by measuring whether printable runs cross the block joins (0.9856 against an interior control). 11

Twenty-four megabytes of a Macintosh, inside the files. One 1,515,520-byte block of uninitialised memory pressed sixteen times, plus the 1,148-byte tail of every one of the 149 background blocks. 68000 stack frames in matched pairs, Macintosh Programmer's Workshop strings, and twenty-five Volume:Folder: paths that reconstruct a 1994 development machine — including a Japanese build, which is where the Kanji font on a European disc comes from. The disc's own credits name the machine's owner. 12

The thesis

The same twenty recordings exist twice, and the codec had nothing to do with the difference. English is 44,100 Hz sixteen-bit SDX2; French is 10,000 Hz eight-bit uncompressed. The 5.9974 : 1 byte ratio factorises exactly into 4.4100 (sample rate) × 1.3600 (running time), so the codec's factor is 1.0000 — SDX2 and eight-bit PCM both store one byte per sample. Dropping the codec on the French saved nothing and cost eight bits of resolution. The owner of this disc listened and settled the other half: the same text, spoken faster. 09

The chapters

00	predictions, written before the disc was opened — 53 clauses
01	one pressing: the denominator, the coverage, what it keeps and loses
02	the sheet: every figure with the command that makes it again
03	Opera a fifth time: a five-block root, and a label whose copies disagree
04	every sector: the map that does not close
05	the boot chain, and three languages the program names and the disc lacks
06	Derceto in 149 pictures, and a block that is forty sectors
07	ten screens, two pixel orders, and an extension that means seven things
08	a PC game's archives, and they are PKZIP with the headers filed off
09	two languages: a sixth of the bytes, and the codec had nothing to do with it
10	146 megabytes with no container, and five magic numbers that are four samples
11	thirty-four megabytes of somebody else's computer, pressed and sold
12	Keith's Macintosh: 24 megabytes of a build machine, inside the files
13	the same film on two discs, and a hash census reports zero
14	against the collection: 116 of 116, and a third point on the debug driver
15	what this disc changed in the platform checklist
16	corrections: mine, the pre-briefing's, the toolbox's and the checklist's
17	scoring the predictions
18	what this session refused, and how much of the disc that is

The lists

notes/sha1-all.txt — 251 files, SHA-1 first. notes/copies.txt — every copy the directory declares, hashed. notes/pak-members.txt — 2,072 archive members, offset, sizes, type, ZIP signature and hash each. notes/pics-list.txt — 149 camera backgrounds, one record per image. notes/audio-list.txt — every recorded sound, both containers, with the rates that are assumed marked as assumed. notes/crossall.txt — the collection sweep. notes/owner-observations.txt — what the owner of the disc heard, and what the session did with it.

The platform checklist

Everything this disc taught about the format rather than about the title went into the single copy: 3do-platformnotes-doc, which now covers five discs, at commit 7fc9840 — +815 lines, −140, two [4 of 4] marks broken, two of its own searches corrected and a new section 13.

The rules this repository follows

No bytes of the product are here — the hashes yes, the bytes no. Nothing was executed and nothing was emulated. Every figure carries the command that re-derives it. Predictions were written before the disc was opened and the wrong ones are left where they stand.