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Recovering Lost Data from Aladdin's Source Code
🕑 Added 2017-10-11 19:07:42 +0000 UTC Hi everyone! I'm really proud to publish the first result from our Writing Fund today - a totally comprehensive deep dive into the source code for Disney's Aladdin on the Sega Genesis, including an attempt to restore cut content (like the prisoner enemy in the video above)! The article is live on our website here:https://gamehistory.org/aladdin-source-code/
Source code like this can tell us more about the making of a game than just about any other artifact. Examining it can tell us not only how the game as-is works on a programmatic level, but how it was intended to work. A well-trained archaeologist (like this piece's author, Rich Whitehouse) can reverse-engineer parts of the code that were commented out and get them functioning again. In one case, he even restored a piece of content by finding its art files in a hidden "Trash" folder - he literally dug in the trash to find it.
Unfortunately, source code like this is rarely documented and saved. I hope this is merely the beginning of our foray into archiving source code.
Anyway, let me know what you think! Is this the kind of thing you'd like to see more of?
Comments
Mysterii
You also mentioned a plug-in for Noesis in the article but never link to it. Is there a reason why?
Ariana
nice
As a gamer and an artist, this article was absolutely fascinating! I also a enjoy a good 'behind-the-scenes' feature for movies, so it only makes sense to see this kind of thing for games! Thanks for digging all of this up! Great work!
Techokami
The information in the article is really interesting and I would love to see more of it! But uh, there's something missing in the article... a download to the source code archive itself! You really should consider putting it up, as extra eyes will lead to a more in-depth analysis and possibly catch something that Rich may have overlooked. EDIT: Oh I should also mention, the article talks about using tUME for map editing. However, the page linked has broken downloads. I did manage to recover the files via the Wayback Machine, as tUME was released as open source software in the mid-2000s. I can set up a file mirror if you'd like.
