A byte-level study of seven files and 329,541 bytes, of which 99.4353 % is one floppy image that boots its own operating system and never touches DOS; in which the volume's own header declares a volume twice the size of the file, the 212 blocks that do fit are not the file the directory says they are, four bytes of a 1987 interpreter carry the nickname of a Japanese programmer from 1997, and eight characters named after the Blues Brothers band are saved on the disk with 384 bytes of the game's own Pascal source in the slack beside them.
No product bytes are in this repository — hashes, formats, figures and the commands that reproduce them are. The rendered artwork lives outside it.
| what it is | Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord on the IBM PC: a self-booting UCSD p-System volume named WIZBOOT, 13 files, plus a third-party DOS emulator from 1996–98. 01 |
| the three denominators | 329,541 bytes of files · 327,680 bytes of image · 651,264 bytes that the image's own volume header declares. The third is larger than the second and every figure names which it stands on. 01 |
| is it a DOS game | No, and it is not close. INT 21h occurs 0 times in 327,680 bytes; INT 13h occurs 3 against a chance rate of 5.0; 7 of the 10 fields an MS-DOS BPB requires fail and there is no 55 AA. Three of dos-platformnotes-doc's six sections have an empty population here, and nothing is published to it. 14 |
| the missing two thirds | ZOT is 844 blocks = 66.3522 % of the declared volume; the image ends 632 blocks short, by two independent subtractions. 06 |
| and the part that fits is not it either | Of the 212 blocks the directory assigns to ZOT, 166 are byte-for-byte copies of blocks 224..427 of the same image at a constant −204, 8 are 0xF6 MS-DOS FORMAT fill, and 0 are ZOT. 06 |
| the palimpsest | The residue is an earlier generation of this volume carrying an interpreter build thirteen days older — 8/28/87 against 9/10/87 — laid out 204 blocks later, so 104,448 bytes used to sit between SYSTEM.PASCAL and ASCII.KRN. 06 |
| four bytes that are not 1987 | The p-machine message table occurs four times on the image. Three read Divided by Zero; one reads Divided by Take, and (Take) is how the author of the 1996–98 emulator signs himself twice in the file beside it. 08 |
| the program | 16 segments, 659 procedures, 659 of 659 self-relative entry pointers inside their own segment, and 89,088 bytes accounted for with residue 0. One of the sixteen is KANJIREA. 07 |
| it is three games | SYSTEM.PASCAL matches six characters of a title against PROVIN/KNIGHT/LEGACY and their THE forms to decide which of the first three Wizardry scenarios it is running. 07 |
| the pictures | 200.TITLE is 400.TITLE with every odd column cleared, on 40,960 of 40,960 pixels. The two .ICN are 44 × 32 and the second is not a mask: 370 of 519 ink pixels fall outside it. 09 |
| the Japanese question | KANA.KEYMAP holds 44 strictly ascending Shift-JIS codes in gojūon order — an index over JIS level 1 — and the character sets carry both kana syllabaries. Every string a player reads is English, and neither KANA.KRN nor KANJI.KRN is on the volume. 11 |
| the emulator | 1,388 bytes that hook INT 18h and INT 16h, compute a file offset of exactly LBA × 512, click the PC speaker on every access, and flush your saved characters before restoring your video mode. Read, not run. 12 |
| original to its era | 99.9933 % of the image is 1987 or earlier — 327,658 of 327,680. Twenty-two bytes are not, and they are the twenty-two that decide whether it runs. 13 |
| user state | Eight saved characters at a 208-byte pitch, race, class and alignment decoded, and 8 of 8 satisfy the game's own class-alignment restriction under that reading. They are named after the Blues Brothers band. 10 |
| the source | 384 bytes of the game's UCSD Pascal source text in the slack of the save file, in the CR+DLE layout of a UCSD .TEXT file. 10 |
| coverage | derived 4.9557 % of the image · identified but not derived 81.6068 % · not derived at all 13.4375 % · residue 0. On the declared volume, derived 2.4935 % and 49.6855 % absent. 01 |
| against the collection | 0 crossings of 7 over 89 repositories — and with seven hashes that zero has almost no power, which is the opposite of the last two objects. 14 |
| the tools | 447 files, two written here. The fourth reader in four sessions to print a summary over a population of zero, and one that wrote a PNG into the object directory. 15 |
| predictions | 59 clauses written before a byte was read. inherited 18.20 of 19, open 31.80 of 40, never summed. Twentieth calibration point −4.95. 18 |
| # | chapter | what it settles |
|---|---|---|
| 00 | predictions | 59 clauses, written before anything was opened, counted by tools/predcount.py |
| 01 | the object | three denominators, what it conserves, what it loses, coverage on each |
| 02 | the technical sheet | every figure in the repository with the command that reprints it |
| 03 | what does not apply | no MZ, no packer, no relocation table — and the sectors come back |
| 04 | the boot block | 7 of 10 BPB fields fail; the jump that skips the disk driver; the protection question |
| 05 | the p-System volume | 26 = 2+2+2+1+15+2+2, thirteen chained extents, zero free blocks |
| 06 | ZOT |
the extent audit was right and the content check found more |
| 07 | sixteen segments | 659 procedures, the scenario chain, the files it opens and cannot find |
| 08 | the interpreter | Divided by Take, and what the p-machine tells the player about the hardware |
| 09 | the pictures | 100.0000 % on the titles, a mask that is not one, kana in the character set |
| 10 | the people | the party, the source in the slack, and three names — one published, one redacted |
| 11 | the Japanese question | a kana-to-kanji index on an English disk |
| 12 | the emulator | 1,388 bytes read end to end, and why reading is not running |
| 13 | the calendar | three strata, twenty-two bytes, and yes and no |
| 14 | against the collection | 0 of 7 and what it is worth; the decision on dos-platformnotes-doc |
| 15 | the tools | 447 files, two written here, four defects and one repair |
| 16 | leftovers | eleven open questions and eight abbreviations, one demonstrated |
| 17 | corrections | six errors in the briefing, one with its disproof printed three lines away |
| 18 | prediction scoring | clause by clause, two totals, and the twentieth calibration point |
python tools/psystem.py IMAGE # header, thirteen entries, EXTENT AUDIT
python tools/psystem.py IMAGE --blocks # per-block allocation map
python tools/psystem.py IMAGE --extract-all D # the present blocks of each file
python tools/psystem.py --refuse FILE... # assert an input is NOT a volume
python tools/icn.py FILE... # header, arithmetic, ASCII render
python tools/icn.py FILE --lsb --invert # the three losing readings
python tools/icn.py --refuse FILE...
Both validate before they census, and both were shown refusing before any
figure they produced was quoted. psystem.py's reason for existing is the
second column of its audit: a directory is arithmetic about itself, and none of
that arithmetic involves the length of the file the directory is stored in.
Primary index: pc-gamelist-doc.
Its Saga cell is deliberately empty, and this is the fourth time that rule
has said no. The object measurably supports three Wizardry scenarios — chapter
07 has the comparison chain that identifies them — but no second member of the
series has been measured in this collection, and the rule fills on a
measurement of a second member or not at all. A program that can run the sequels
is not a sequel measured.
dos-platformnotes-doc is not touched by this repository, and chapter 14 is the decision rather than the omission: three of its six sections have nothing on this object to run on, the tempting contribution would put a non-DOS filesystem into a document about DOS executables, and a family checklist written on the strength of one object is the error that document itself was created to avoid.
The one thing this session did do with it was cite section 5 instead of re-deriving it — DOS timestamps have two-second granularity, so seven even seconds out of seven is one fact about FAT and not seven about the object.