Infocom mystery binary

David Griffith dave at 661.org
Wed Apr 24 05:14:58 CDT 2019


My reply is at the bottom.  Please put your reply there too.
On Wed, 24 Apr 2019, Ethan Dicks wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 23, 2019 at 9:58 PM David Griffith via cctalk
> <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>> In one of the repositories of Infocom game source code recently uploaded
>> to Github, there's an executable that appears to have come from an m68k
>> Unix machine of some sort.  It's at
>> https://github.com/historicalsource/zork-german/blob/master/zap. Over at
>> intfiction.org[1], it was initially claimed to be from a Macintosh.  Then
>> I suggested it was from a pre-Sparc Sun machine.  Then someone else
>> suggested it was from A/UX.  Does anyone know anything more conclusive?
>
> Doing file(1) on it, I get...
>
> $ file zap
> zap: mc68k COFF object not stripped (demand paged)
>
> I also happen to have another version (not from github)
>
> $ file sun/zap
> mc68020 demand paged dynamically linked executable not stripped
>
> _That_ one is a Sun3 binary.

I see.  Mystery solved!

Oooo... Where did that one come from?

When I first noticed that the binary wasn't stripped, I tried poking 
around with assorted disassemblers and decompilers hoping to get something 
resembling C code out of it.


-- 
David Griffith
dave at 661.org

A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
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