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And I have no idea what the gently caress to do. I mean, I know I need an assembler and I have a makefile. Also I have an assembler (the one recommended by the makefile, TASM) but I have literally zero idea on how to link it to a makefile. I guess I could use visual studio but I don't own it and pirating it seems like a huge hassle. Does anybody here have any information they could shed for me? I'd seriously do it myself but it's part of a huge overarching project and this is like the fifth task removed from the actual development of the project. To briefly sum up the current cascade of me being the most cucked fool alive: I need custom graphics injected into this old game. This requires fixing offsets that the EXE uses to store information about stuff in the graphics files. The EXE is packed using Microsoft's EXEPACK utility I have a toolchain that can fix the offsets for the EXE, but it relies on the EXE being unpacked a certain way and there's only one utility that can do it I spent all day yesterday trying to get this utility to work, however it continually throws an error at me that it can't rename the temporary file and it just shuts everything down before it can unpack the EXE I opened up the source for the utility, which is entirely in MASM and I have zero loving clue what is happening beyond the flag that throws the error The utility comes with a super neat parameter in the source code that when enabled logs EVERYTHING that it does, which will tell me the exact point where it shits the bed However I can't loving assemble this poo poo because it's antiquated as gently caress and I spent the last 3 hours trying to figure out how to assemble this piece of poo poo My 1337 h4x sk1llz aren't super developed and I could really use some spoon feeding if anybody has a loving clue.
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Jan 21, 2017 08:13
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 09:53 |
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Visual Studio is free for personal poo poo now so just download it: https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/community/ Use ml.exe to assemble the asm file, if you need to link it with other things then use /c /coff to dump an obj file instead and feed that to the linker.
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Jan 21, 2017 09:34
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Ya, the community version is free. You can just use ml.exe or if you want to use msbuild here's this guide on using masm in VS: http://www.kipirvine.com/asm/gettingStartedVS2015/index.htm Do you just need to unpack the exepack'd file and fix the offsets, or is there some other spooky stuff going on? If you post the asm source I might be able to correct it or churn out a binary for you.
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Jan 21, 2017 16:27
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i dunno if vs can compile for ms-dos though and thats what this utility was written for (it's a .com file) https://files.catbox.moe/59x4z3.zip here's the source with the original doc and .com file as for what else needs to happen, its all covered by the toolchain im using. this is just a fulcrum of failure and its decently important for the polish of the finished project otherwise i have to scrap all the current documentation of the unpacked exe, and not only start from square one with reverse engineering the drat thing, but i'd also end up manually doing all the work with a hex editor instead of a nice automated tool.
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Jan 21, 2017 21:12
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Yeah you're right, unless you can use dosbox or something. The code is using dos api calls (int 21) to do file management among a few other silly things. You could replace all of the dos interrupts with win32 api calls, or port the code entirely, but that's probably the hard route to go for what you want to do.
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Jan 22, 2017 02:23
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If you want to try running it under DOSBox, then you'll need to find a DOS linker. You can probably link it to an EXE instead and it might still work? Try this maybe. http://alink.sourceforge.net/
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Jan 22, 2017 02:40
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Actually the makefile says to use tasm and tlink. I shoulda known by the lack of WORD PTR JUST SO YOU KNOW [ax] Oh you mention this! Have you tried getting ahold of tasm and dosbox and running code:dougdrums fucked around with this message at 03:05 on Jan 22, 2017 |
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Jan 22, 2017 02:56
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i havent yet used tasm in dosbox, i fiddled with it in windows, will try it out in a short bit thanks for the suggestion
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Jan 22, 2017 04:44
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update on that, I successfully got it to assemble. It runs this for twelve thousand years then it ends with this  logging was a lot less useful than i thought it was going to be... im starting to think my only solution will be to spend some hours brute forcing the source to TRY and get it skip renaming the temp file and just write to the original.
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Jan 22, 2017 05:00
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If I take the code for its word (I guess I'm not a very good dos hacker either :p) if you take out lines 928-947 in iup.asm:code:
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Jan 22, 2017 14:45
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 09:53 |
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No, it simply deleted the input file
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Jan 22, 2017 17:29
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