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First post, by comradesean

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Out of this World doesn't have much chatter in google groups for me to use as a reference so I've been hitting a few walls. The earliest physical copy of this game I've been able to find has a 5/4/1992 timestamped world.exe on disk 1, but looking up scene releases on defacto2 shows me that it was available as early as 5/2/1992 and that they even had access to it a few days earlier than that.

Unfortunately, that's a huge brick wall I've run into and I've had zero luck finding this particular scene release to compare against my current disk. I was wondering if anyone might have this particular release of the game or maybe even some resources I don't have in regards to locating this information.

Reply 1 of 2, by comradesean

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Got my hand on the FLT release and this is strange. Most of the files are similiar, including timestamps. The only differences are that the install.bat was designed to support up to 5 installation disks and the WORLD.EXE was compressed using PKLITE and nearly triples in size uncompressed.

edit:
It appears the retail executable has been compressed using the software DIET? Will run a hex comparison as soon as I find a binary of it.

4D 5A 44 01 2A 00 00 00 02 00 B5 14 FF FF E8 0A             MZD.*.....µ.ÿÿè.
00 08 00 00 0D 00 21 05 1C 00 00 00 44 49 45 54 ......!.....DIET

Reply 2 of 2, by comradesean

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It's really strange. DIET actually packs executables with a lowercase "diet" in that very same location, but I wasn't able to find any version to actually unpack it. I also tried CyberWare Universal Unpacker without any luck.

I finally located an application called "The Executable's Unpacker" which appears to unpack it, but the executable comes out scrambled and inoperable. I can locate readable ASCII though so it might just be missing some of it's code.