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03/02/2022 Introduction: Memories from the DOS days

A project log for Reverse engineering a DOS PC FMV Game from 1994

Accidental digital archeology and hijinks trying to dump image, animation, video, and sound info from the MSDOS game "The Lawnmower Man".

cprossucprossu 03/06/2022 at 19:400 Comments

So I want to take you back to 1994 to set this up right

My father decided to continue his education at college, and my parents collectively purchased a computer since the typewriter was not cutting it and the computers at the college were notoriously unreliable.

$2,300 got us a brand new (and FDIV Bugged) Socket 5 Pentium 75MHZ with 8MB of ram, a S3 Vision864 Super VGA Card, a 15" monitor, a brand new 2X NEC CDROM drive, a Vibra16 sound card, a staggeringly large 795MB hard drive, a 14.4 US Robotics internal modem, a floppy drive, a keyboard, and a mouse. The printer was also not cheap, but it's not relevant to this story.

Bundled with the computer were things like Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Microsoft Word, Excel, Bookshelf 1994, and a plethora of mostly terrible CDROM video games, one of which stuck in my mind and is the subject for this experiment. It certainly was not because it was easy to play or even run, I remember fumbling my way through and needed to make a special modified config.sys and autoexec.bat to even have enough conventional memory to run the program without it crashing with an out of memory error.

The game was "The Lawnmower Man" based on the movie and took place after the events of the original movie.

I recall it had some really awesome concepts, awesome "graphics" for the time (although somewhat choppy), disturbing visuals, and a killer soundtrack. It was impossible for me to complete, as it the slip of paper that came with the game didn't give many hints I could understand. Controls didn't seem to do what they should, there were time limits. It also did not help that the entire game was based on what would later be coined 'quick time events' and very hard puzzles.
You had 3 chances at failure, there was no save system, no password system, some of the minigames had time limits, and the success or failure was often cryptic, all of this AND if you accidentally pressed the <ESC> key, it would exit to DOS and you'd have to start it right from the beginning. Again, I never beat it. 

It's 2022 now so I thought about this game... Looking at it now and knowing more, I can now say it's similar in concept and execution to the arcade game "Dragon's Lair".

Bothering me and at the top on my mind though: How did they do what they did using DOS?! It was WAY overambitious for the time! Not too many games from that day attempted similar.

With that in mind, I figured that I could find a copy of this old game and see if it's possible to dump the awesome music, maybe some of the visuals out of it, and see if there are hints to how it was made/developed.

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