Foone! Everyone’s favorite examiner of old game code! She’s been looking at the Enhanced DOS Port of Where In The World is Carmen Sandiego! The surplus of exclamation points is how you know I’m not an “AI!” I use the scare quotes because it’s not “Artificial Intelligence” at all! Introduction and silly digression concluded! Opening paragraph complete!
Foone began her journey in search of the elusive mastermind back at the start of the year, and the thread is still going on. One of the early hacks she made is putting herself into the game as one of the criminals. I think this screen isn’t faked. She made and maintains the Death Generator website, so it wouldn’t even be particularly hard for her I think.
Some notes from the very long thread, which is still going:
- Nouns used as verbs encountered: gibberish, chunk.
- The game has support for changing the Acme Detective Agency image depending on different seasons of the year.
- There is a handheld version of Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego, which is actually a small DOS emulator, here’s the back of its box:
And here’s all of the people you can talk to in the DOS version:
- The 1985 DOS version (so, not the one we’ve been following) has an invert-Y function for the joystick, in case you want to use a flight yoke controller.
- A reference is made a post on Raymond Chen’s (awesome) Old New Thing blog, about a DOS game running under Windows 95 that crashed because it saw too much memory. It handled memory by allocating and allocating and expecting to be told “no” eventually. Windows 95 would keep giving it memory, going to virtual memory, from the swapfile. The program didn’t expect to keep being given more memory, and eventually it overflowed the array it used to keep track of it all. This seems to be the Old New Thing post.
- On the world changing beneath the game: the frowned-upon word for Romani (beginning with ‘G’) is patched, the Brazilian currency name was wrong even when the game was released, lots of changed flags, the fall of the Soviet Union changed lots of things.
