The Secrets of Hosea Freeman (Tandy VIS, 1992) — a documentation pass

A CD-ROM nobody could identify, including the person who owns it. It turns out to be an interactive treasure hunt through a nineteenth-century whaling merchant's house in New Bedford, Massachusetts and the New Bedford Whaling Museum, narrated by a costumed character who appears to the player in a mirror, with thirty-one numbered rooms and a riddle in each.

It is the third Tandy / Memorex Video Information System pressing to be documented end to end, and the third that does not resemble either of the other two.

The short card

object	Secrets of Hosea Freeman, The (USA).bin + .cue, 271,954,704 + 101 bytes
sha1	af36afe5264edd811f07e7ba4dcfcd345455f872
medium	one MODE1/2352 track, 115,627 sectors, no audio track, 34.7228 % of a 74-minute CD
pressing	115,627 of 115,627 on all six mode1.py checks, zero mismatches
volume	ISO 9660, HOSEA, publisher TANDY, preparer MERIDIAN_DATA_CD_PUBLISHER, cut 1992-12-08 02:01:27
content	32 directories, 1,161 files, 234,313,772 bytes
structure	one directory /DEMO, 31 STORYnn rooms — 00..26 and 32..35, with 27..31 absent as a run of five
speech	524 .WAV, 46 min 38 s, PCM 22,050 Hz 16-bit mono on 522 of 524
films	59 .VID, RIFF form type ANIM, 8,040 frames, no compression anywhere
pictures	546 .BID, all BM, 532 of them 320 × 200 × 8 at exactly 65,078 bytes
program	26 bytecode scripts (123,904 B), HOSEA.EXE (49,680 B), PLAYBACK.DLL (28,832 B), OPENDOOR.COM (7 B)
program share	0.0335 % — the platform's third reading of its most stable number
digitised audio	65.3623 % of the content
accounting	236,804,096 bytes attributed, residue 0
crossings against 116 repositories	0 of 1,013 distinct sha1

What is new here

• RIFF/ANIM derived in full — the platform's third moving-picture format, after ICOM's .IMV and Video for Windows. Uncompressed rectangular blits onto a persistent framebuffer, with a 6-bit VGA DAC palette. tools/riffanim.py reads it and refuses everything else.
• PLAYBACK.DLL, the first .DLL on any VIS pressing, is the movie player, and its five exports say so by name: PLAYVIDEO STOPVIDEO ONESHOTCALLBACK DISPLAYNEXTFRAME WEP.
• HOSEA.EXE is not called HOSEA. Its module name is MM and its description is Multimedia; it is a reusable bytecode interpreter, and it names a second product — Multimedia Bug-A-Boo — that is not on the disc.
• The 26 extensionless files are the game, and every one of them carries the Apple II ProDOS 8 QUIT code's message table in high-bit-set ASCII.
• The first retail DISPDIB import on the platform — and it is deliberately not recorded as an answer to open question 2.
• The Meridian free-extent record found and its arithmetic closed: 114,952 + 517 = 115,469, plus a free-space bitmap sector with exactly 517 bits set.
• The byte-level cross-disc comparison §12 of the platform notes has asked for since before the first VIS pipeline — tools/bytecross.py. Two discs' WIN.INI differ by one byte at offset 132; three discs' CONTROL.TAT are byte-identical over their first 84.
• 546 bitmaps that declare bottom-up and are stored top-down, which no arithmetic check can see.

The chapters

00 — Predictions	70 clauses written before the object was opened
01 — The object	what it is, four denominators, what it preserves and loses
02 — Datasheet	every number with the command that reproduces it
03 — The medium	a clean pressing, four Meridian fingerprints, 550 unclaimed sectors
04 — RIFF/ANIM	the format, the refusals, and the two things arithmetic could not decide
05 — The bitmaps	546 DIBs that lie about which way up they are
06 — The speech	46 minutes at sixteen bits, and the API the notes say does not work
07 — The scripts	a bytecode, a word list, and an Apple II
08 — The executable	an engine called Multimedia, and the product it was also built for
09 — The player DLL	the platform's first DLL, and it is the whole disc
10 — The vendor block	a length model six of six, and seven bytes that ask a question
11 — The game	a ghost in a mirror, a house, thirty-one riddles
12 — The question	what a VIS title is, when the third is like neither
13 — Provenance	three dates, one mastering house
14 — Against the collection	a third zero, and the test that had never been run
15 — Leftovers	orphan sectors, a second product, twelve unexplained bytes
16 — Corrections	six in the pre-briefing, three of mine, one owed to a neighbour
17 — Not done	what a next session should run, and the tools that lied
18 — Scorecard	inherited 19.50 of 20, open 32.50 of 50

Rules this repository follows

No bytes of the product are here. Hashes yes, bytes no. The .bin, the .cue, _pre\, _work\ and prompt.txt are all in .gitignore, verified in both directions with a positive control.

Nothing was executed and nothing was emulated. Public formats — ISO 9660, RIFF, BM/DIB, MZ, NE — are read with their public definitions and the document says so. RIFF/ANIM and the script format are derived from the bytes.

Every count states its denominator, and there are four of them.

Related

• vis-platformnotes-doc — the platform checklist, updated by this session
• vis-sherlockholmes-doc — the first documented pressing
• vis-racetheclock-doc — the second, and the nearest neighbour; a correction is owed to it and is in 16