Measure: one MODE1/2352 track, 271,954,704 bytes, 115,627 sectors, cut
1992-12-08. Every figure below is re-derived by a command in
02-datasheet.md.
The Secrets of Hosea Freeman, Tandy / Memorex Video Information
System, USA, 1992. CONTROL.TAT's title field names the studio:
Secrets of Hosea Freeman - Top Ten Software. The ISO 9660 publisher field
reads TANDY; the data preparer reads MERIDIAN_DATA_CD_PUBLISHER.
The owner of the machine handed this disc over with the words "I honestly have no idea what it is." Neither did the file system. This chapter says what it is, and the answer took two commands and one look: render a bitmap, and put it in front of a person.
It is an interactive treasure hunt inside a real building. The player moves
through the rooms of a nineteenth-century New Bedford, Massachusetts mansion —
kitchen, parlour, library, bedrooms, hall — and through the New Bedford
Whaling Museum, whose floor plan the disc draws with its rooms labelled
LIBRARY, AUDIO VIDEO ROOM, WHALE PRODUCTS ROOM, SCRIMSHAW ROOM,
WHALE SHIP ROOM and INFORMATION DESK. A costumed narrator in a knitted cap
and a nineteenth-century sailor's coat speaks to the player from inside a
mirror on a dresser. Clues are handwritten notes photographed and digitised:
A fire is never so welcome as on a cold winter's night, or when its mantel holds SECRETS as one in this house might.
The menu bar reads HELP STOP GO ON MORE SECRETS WHALING MUSEUM.
Thirty-one numbered STORYnn directories are the places and the episodes,
each holding its own photographs, its own speech and — for five of them — its
own film. The product is 65.3623 % digitised sound by bytes. Somebody talks to
you for most of an hour and shows you photographs of a house.
| what | sectors | bytes |
|---|---|---|
| the pressing, raw | 115,627 × 2,352 | 271,954,704 |
| the cooked user area | 115,627 × 2,048 | 236,804,096 |
| the declared volume | 115,477 × 2,048 | 236,496,896 |
| the bytes inside files | — | 234,313,772 |
Every percentage in this repository names which one it used. The two that do most of the work are the last two: share of the disc means share of 236,804,096, and share of the content means share of 234,313,772.
115,627 ÷ 333,000 = 34.7228 % of a 74-minute CD. This is the smallest of the three documented VIS pressings, against Sherlock Holmes's 445,760,838 declared bytes and Race the Clock's 374,094,820.
| first bytes | what | files | bytes | share of content |
|---|---|---|---|---|
52 49 46 46 + WAVE |
RIFF, wave | 524 | 123,570,715 | 52.7373 % |
52 49 46 46 + ANIM |
RIFF, a format with no public definition | 59 | 75,477,908 | 32.2123 % |
42 4D |
Windows DIB, under the extension .BID |
546 | 35,061,657 | 14.9635 % |
04 04 04 04 |
a bytecode script, derived here | 26 | 123,904 | 0.0529 % |
4D 5A |
MZ, and NE behind it | 2 | 78,512 | 0.0335 % |
| text | two .INI and CONTROL.TAT |
3 | 1,069 | 0.0005 % |
B4 81 B0 11 CD 2F C3 |
seven bytes of 8086 | 1 | 7 | 0.0000 % |
| total | 1,161 | 234,313,772 | 100.0000 % |
The pre-briefing's census by magic put 540 files under BM and said six of
the 546 .BID were "something else that nobody has looked at". All 546 begin
BM. See 16-corrections.md; this repository's residue
line is zero because it was written from a census that counted every file.
It preserves a museum's 1992 interpretation of itself: 546 photographs of a house and a collection, 46 minutes 38 seconds of narration in 524 files, 11 minutes 18 seconds of film with sound and 1 minute 48 seconds without, and the complete bytecode of the program that sequences them.
It loses five of its own chapters. The STORYnn directories run 00..26 and
32..35; 27 through 31 are absent as one contiguous run of five. Neither
binary names them — the executable builds every path from the template
story%02d\%s (§08) — so nothing on the disc knows
they are missing. It also loses whatever INT 2Fh AH=81h does
(§10), because that lives in a ROM.
And it loses its own colours if you read its header instead of looking at it:
546 of 546 bitmaps declare a positive biHeight, which in a Windows DIB means
bottom-up, and all 546 are stored top-down. Every arithmetic check passes
either way. See 05-the-bitmaps.md.
| formats derived from the bytes | RIFF/ANIM (32.2123 %), the 04 04 04 04 script (0.0529 %) |
| formats read with a public definition, and said so | ISO 9660, RIFF/WAVE, BM/DIB, MZ, NE |
| bytes under a derived format | 75,601,812 = 32.2652 % |
| bytes under a public format | 158,711,960 = 67.7348 % |
| bytes not accounted for | 0 |
| sectors attributed | 115,627 of 115,627, residue 0 (03) |
Nothing on this disc is undocumented after this session except the meaning of
twelve binary bytes in CONTROL.TAT, one 16-bit field per film frame, and a
ROM call number. Those three are named in 15-leftovers.md
with the command that would close each.