Planet Descent
Technical => Technical => Topic started by: nitrusix on December 12, 2020, 12:38:17 PM
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Back in the day, there was a tool called Descent Manager for Dos that could edit Descent 1 and 2 savegame (sg0/sgx) files to change what weapons you had, how much energy you had, etc. I found dmdosb2 on the Wayback Machine, but have had zero luck getting it going in Dosbox. Just wanted to pop in here to see if anybody had the tech information on the SaveGame files or newer tools compatible with modern OS's.
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I got dmdosb2 running on a VM with DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.1, but it's just for Demos.
Maybe it was Descent Manager for DOS before it got taken over by the Descent2.com team and turned into Win32 programs.
So...anybody got a copy of "dmanb06f.exe" lying around? I lost mine when my NAS crashed back in 2008.
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Sadly I don't. Where was it originally hosted at?
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The original DOS Descent Manager was on one of the Descent Network sites (I forget where exactly). The DOS program and the Win32 ones were all done by the same person (Heiko Hermann, might be a slight misspelling there). One of those, MVEEXTRACT32, met with copyright problems with Interplay (though it didn't know the MVE format, what it was doing was enough for Interplay to complain about it), and had to be removed. The DOS version also had that functionality, though it didn't go away immediately.
Unfortunately, it seems the Descent Network sites are all long gone (I get DNS errors on them).
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Is it perhaps on the wayback machine?
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Does wayback archive downloads? I've never tried looking for ancient downloads on it.
I know the Descent Network site did have the specs about the various Descent formats. Wonder how hard it'd be to build a new save editing program.
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No, Wayback usually doesn't archive downloads, because more often than not, the origin of that download is technically located at a different address than the page they are archiving. That and I'm sure there's some legal considerations they have to keep in mind, you know, so they aren't accidentally sharing content the original owner of that content no longer wants shared in such a manner.
I mean, you occasionally do get lucky, but it depends on how popular the download is and how much time has passed. The less its popularity and the more time has gone by, the less likely it was archived by Wayback.
Short version: I highly doubt you'd found this download via Wayback.
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dmanb06f.exe is actually on the Wayback archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20181216093752/http://download.descent-network.com/descman/kits/descman.dos/dmanb06f.exe (https://web.archive.org/web/20181216093752/http://download.descent-network.com/descman/kits/descman.dos/dmanb06f.exe)
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Then never mind me then. :P
That said, I did test download it myself to confirm it actually is a properly functioning download, and it appears that it is, but I should alert everybody that I could not get the program to run (at least out of the box) on my Windows 10 system, so it might take some fanangling to run it.
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64-bit versions of Windows cannot run 16-bit programs (which includes all DOS programs) because the necessary WoW (Windows on Windows) subsystem is not included. You need to use DOSBox or something similar. I used DOSBox-X and it seemed to run fine.