caligari truespace 4.0 source for win9x

as released by the scene group Revolt in 1998

this is not my release - just my archival work. the source for truespace has been hiding in plain sight for 25+ years. having exhausted all my known avenues for finding an "official" seal of approval from the publisher, community-based preservation is the only possibility now.

the story: apparently someone from Revolt went to caligari's public FTP server in the late 90s, and found that an employee had left the full source for TrueSpace 4 in a /pub folder. it was released on BBSes and on IRC in the late 90s, and disappeared from the internet soon after.

doing some research on TrueSpace - truly the best piece of 3D modelling/rendering software aside from Bryce in the 90s - i stumbled upon a brief mention of the source code in an ancient usenet post. tracking down the release involved searching the *exceptional* scenelist.org NFO database, and trying to figure out the exact filename of the warez release.

SCiZE, the scenelist.org owner, did not have the files on his BBS. fortunately, he knew exactly where to find the release: it was buried in the massive 500GB "ibm-wgam-wbiz-collection" on IA. knowing the exact filename made it so much easier to track down in there!

so, have some fun with it. this doesn't belong on github or any publicly scrapable source site. just download it and let's see who can manage to compile it first :)

see the instructions in revolt.nfo for extra help on compiling

https://archive.org/details/ts4src

When was the last time you heard the #warez word?

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/amazon-and-audible-flooded-with-forex-trading-and-warez-listings/

it took me two years to remember the name of this palm pilot/pda piracy website that was wildly popular in the early #2000s

MrTAXI was the grand central station of palm pilot #warez in the day. like Home of the Underdogs, it also acted as a kind of repository for obscure pda software that was difficult to find, nevermind purchase.

i'm so glad that WBM managed to archive a fairly solid copy of the site, which bounced around from webhost to webhost until it finally disappeared in the mid 00's: https://web.archive.org/web/20040630083143/http://mrtaxi.karnt.com/

also very happy to report that uh, /u/skeletons_asshole, kept a mirror of mrtaxi's 4000+ PDA programs for archival purposes.. download here: https://mrtaxi.yeow.ch/mrtaxi.7z
a copy has also been saved at IA: https://archive.org/details/mrtaxi.7z

in a few days i'll put these up as a new exhibit at a live online #worldwideweb museum i'm putting together

Many moons ago I was alerted by a friend that my name appeared in a #warez software collection. I was puzzled as I definitely had not released any warez. I quickly peered over the said #TOSEC archive, and true enough my name appeared in one of the file names:

Kickstart v3.1 rev 40.69 (1993)(Commodore)(A1200)[h Harry Sintonen].rom

The “h” in the filename is part of the TOSEC “dump info flags”: “[h Hacker] – Hacked by (group or person)”. This means that “The original software has been deliberately hacked/altered in some way, such as adding an intro or changing in game sprites or text.”

I immediately had a hunch what was going on, but for this story to make more sense to regular folks, some background information is necessary. Way back I used to do fair bit of hobby utility coding for Amiga computers. One of my best received software was a small utility called BlizKick.

Most #Commodore #Amiga computers shipped with rather poor configuration out of the box. To remedy this, 3rd party manufacturers created CPU accelerator boards with higher spec, faster CPUs and often faster local memory. A feature some of these accelerators provided was called “MAPROM”; it would create a copy of the system ROM to a faster local accelerator RAM and then transparently map this memory to replace the ROM. This offered a significant performance boost, since on many systems the accelerator normally would need to fetch the ROM code from over the relatively narrow and thus slow local bus.

In mid-90s I obtained a Blizzard 1230-MK III accelerator by Phase 5 Digital Products for my Amiga 1200 which included this MAPROM feature. Initially I thought it was implemented fully in hardware, but at some point, I figured out it likely was just software. I ended up #reverseengineering the accelerator firmware (as you do), and then found out that the MAPROM feature was relatively simple: If it was enabled, it’d just copy the ROM area to end of local accelerator memory, poke certain hardware register and then proceed to reboot the system.

At the time my Amiga 1200 included Kickstart 3.0 ROM, which wasn’t the very latest version. Kickstart version 3.1 was also available, and it fixed some bugs. While the physical Kickstart 3.1 ROM set was being sold, it dawned upon me that I might be able to get away from upgrading the ROM set by using the MAPROM feature to map a different Kickstart ROM entirely, rather than the one the system was equipped with. Quick and dirty proof of concept program confirmed that this worked fine, and thus BlizKick tool was born.

Initially the program just allowed you to specific which Kickstart ROM image to load from disk and replace the ROM with. Later, it dawned to me that I could also install small patches to the ROM direct, right after loading the file. This could offer benefits, such as fixing bugs that even the latest ROM sets had, in addition of pulling even fancies tricks, such as completely disabling the (rather annoying) amiga floppy drive click, or installing a patch that would significantly speed up the Amiga 1200 IDE controller. Initially I wrote these patches direct to BlizKick itself, but later decided to modularize them. This allowed me to also write a separate patcher application that would apply any given modules to an existing Kickstart ROM image file and save the resulting, patched new image file.

And here we finally come to the gist of this toot and why my name is appearing in TOSEC warez collection: Someone applied (some) of my BlizKick patches to the Amiga 1200 Kickstart ROM 3.1 and then indicated this fact with “[h] Harry Sintonen”, even though I would have preferred not to be credited this way.

At the time Amiga was already as dead as the dodo, so no-one came knocking. By now it’s ancient history and just a cool anecdote I can toot.