Mega Depack =========== ************** *************** *** ************* ********* *************** *************** *************** ************** Coded by Mike Watson ==================== This version finished - 11/10/1992 ================================== --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Written in 100% 68000 assembler, who needs compilers to do GEM based programs? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- This program is BEERWARE!, to register you have to buy me a beer. Guiness would be nice! The boring bits This program is public domain and may be distributed on a non profit making basis by bulletin boards and pd libraries. However it can only go on a cover disk of a magazine with my permission, the contact address is at the end of the text. Note - this documentation MUST be included with the program file if you do distribute it. The legal bits This program has been tested as completely as possible and only makes legal system calls without any 'hacking around' and as such should not cause any damage. If for any reason damage is caused then I cannot be held for responsible for it. You use the program at you're own risk. To guard against any mishaps you should save the depacked files out as a different name or in a different folder. On with the show OK folks, what does it do then?? Well a few months ago I had some programs to put on my hard drive and as usual they were packed. While this is no bad thing in itself, the depacking time does tend to offset the loading speed off hard drive, so I unpacked them by hacking around in Monst for a while. Since this was a regular occurance I decided to code a program which would automate this process and would be of great help to my self as well. Anyway I eventually wrote routines to unpack everything I had and was so pleased with the result that I thought other people would like to use it as well. So mega depack was released as public domain at the end of april 1992. However development of the program did not stop there though, it went through more revisions and at about that time I had two letters from people who had seen earlier versions and had found stuff it never depacked. Thanks to Keith Frisby and Rob Gilmour for all their help. During the development of the program I also started to code a GEM shell for it. Version 2 is the result of this work. How to use it Anyone who has used the older versions of the programs will be pleased to see the new GEM interface which is a lot easier to use. Firstly decide on how you wish to use the program, Mega Depack 2 can run as an accessory or a program. Rename it as MEGA_DP2.ACC and copy it into the root directory of your boot disk if you want to run it as an accessory or leave it as MEGA_DP2.PRG and copy it where you like if you are running it as a program. Do not copy it into the auto folder because it uses GEM which is not initialised until after the auto folder programs have been run. To load in a file for unpacking click on the LOAD button. A fileselector will appear and you can select a file for unpacking. The file will then be loaded and an attempt will be made to unpack it. If a successful attempt is made then the SAVE button will be made selectable. Clicking on the save button will bring up a file selector where you can select the file to save to. Clicking on cancel will abort the save process. A new option for v2 is the batch option. Click on the BATCH button and a file selector will appear, select the path that the files will be loaded from. A new file selector will now appear, this time select the destination path where the files will be saved to. After this the files will be loaded,depacked and saved to the destination. There are some files which cannot be easily recognised and require the user to decide themselves on how to unpack it. The clashes are - ice 2.0 and 2.2 have header Ice!. all pompey datafiles have trailer POPI. atom v3.1,3.3 and thunder 1,2 all have header ATOM. When this occurs you are given a choice of depackers to use or a chance to exit. Choose what you think is the right depacker. It will more than likely crash or produce garbage if it is the wrong choice so save it out as a different file name and check it. If something is wrong then try again with another option. Extra bits A new feature of v2 is the ability to recognise several popular file formats. Some may be packed others may not but mega depack2 will reccommend a package to view/use/depack the file. The current files recognised are LHARC, ARC, ZOO, PK ZIP, IFF, DEGAS unpacked, NEO pics, NEO animation object files. If MEGA DEPACK 2 cannot depack a file but suspects that it may have been packed then please send it to me. If you have written a new packer then I would also like to receive it. Ways to spot packed files :- Mega depack may say that it could be packed. The file was packed by yourself. It displays a mesage when loaded e.g 'blah packer v555555 depacking'. Flashes the colours in a hypnotic fashion. Wanted 1. Back issues of Judge Dredd the Megazine(1,3,7,10,12) 2. Any info on the archiving method used by LHARC 2.01, its so much better than Atomic. I have located the depacker inside the archiver but havn't been able to rip it out yet. I want to write an exec packer round this algorithm as it beats everything! 3. Any versions or Sentry packer other than 2.05. And all depack source. Acknowledgements Steve Delany at Floppyshop - the best pd/shareware library in the UK! Keith Frisby - supplier of packers and also the first person to write to me. Rob Gilmour - another person to supply packers. Gordon & Dave - asteroids - the business. DML - photochrome simply the best iff convertor on the st. Gus - for liking star trek and for having a strange sense of humour (totally trek tastic matey!). My CD collection - for providing musical help in the form of New Order, The Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth (nice to see them getting some recognition at last - they have and always will beat Nirvana any day!), Public Enemy, 808 state, The Byrds, The shamen, NIN, The Revolting Cocks , primal scream and many others no mainstream rubbish here *8} The authors of all the - Axe (fire & ice toppled by atomic) packers. - Altair (atomic - 3.5 the business!) - DC software (dcsquish) - Eagle of Sentry (Sentry packer) - The Firehawks (Speed packer) - JMP (Qpack) - JPM (pompey & thunder) - Mike Coates (bytekiller) - Ozz (automation & lsd) - Ralph Hartmann (happy - a brave early attempt, birdies med rez fix was possibly the only useful contribution he's ever made to the st!) - Russ Payne (bytekiller) - Thomas Questor/Markus Fritze (pfx packer) - Tim & Andrew Knipe (jam/jek, g'day!) - Tom Hudson (degas) - Trio inc (spectrum 512 - unispec & digispec are superb!) - Vermillion Pawn (!?) (ivory dragon - strange) - any other packer authors I forgot. ???? Hi to everyone that I met at the Ripped Off convention in Bradford. Griff's new 3d stuff and also that of the rest of the Inner Circle is truely stunning! Please release that little preview of your demo! ADVERTISEMENT TIME - honestly my game is finally finished, just tying up a few loose ends before its's release + it needs testing on TT! Packers supported program/packer versions formats ============== ============ ============================================= 4pak programs atomic 3.1/3.3/3.5 programs and datafiles automation 2.31/2.51 programs and datafiles automation 5.01 programs and datafiles ba pack programs bytekiller 2.0/3.0 programs Russ Paynes dcsquish 1.0/1.2/1.4 programs degas elite picture files pc1-3 gollum programs(both huffed and not) happy programs ice 1.1/2.0/2.2 programs and datafiles 2.3/2.4 ivory dragon programs and datadiles fire 1.0/2.0 programs and datafiles jam 1/2/3/4 programs and datafiles (lzh,lzw,jam,ice) jek 1.2/1.3 programs and datafiles lsd 1.2 programs and datafiles pfx 1.1/2.1 programs pompey 1.5/1.9/2.6 programs and datafiles pompey 1.7/1.9x/2.3 programs 3.0 qpack 2 programs and datafiles sentry 2.05 programs spectrum 512 picture files speed packer 2 programs and datafiles stos programs superior programs thunder 1 programs thunder 2 programs and datafiles unknown programs (used to pack concerto on STF 37) vic2 used on california games 2 47 packers supported 79 different file formats Also recognises a few popular unpacked file formats such as IFF and NEO object files. Just for interest Here's how the files are unpacked (just for the curious). 4pak - uses a modified dissasembly of the depacker. atomic progs - modifies program and jumps into it. atomic 3.1/3.3 data - uses routine supplied with program. atomic 3.5 data - uses a dissassembled routine from the packer. automation 2.3/2.5 program - modifies and runs program. automation 2.3/2.5 data - uses routine supplied with program. automation 5.01 program - modifies and runs program. automation 5.01 program - uses an ICE2.4 depacker. bapack - modifies and jumps into program bytekiller - modifies and jumps into program for Russ Paynes version. uses a dissassembled routine from the depacker on versions 2 and 3. dcsquish 1.0/1.2/1.4 - uses dissassembled code from the depackers. degas elite - uses a dissassembled routine of unknown origin gollum - uses a modified dissasembly of the depacker. happy - uses a heavily modified dissasembly of the depacker. ice progs - all modify and jump into program. ice data - all use routines supplied with program. ivory dragon - programs and datafiles use a dissassembled depacker. fire progs - all modify and jump into program. fire data - v1 is a dissassembly of unknown origin v2 came with program. jam - a real mixture of dissassemblies and code that came with program. the older ones use the old jek routines. most of the programs modify and run the program. lsd/jek - programs are modified and run. datafiles are depacked using a dissassembly of the depacker. pfx - uses a dissassembly of the depacker. pompey - programs are modified and run. datafiles use code that came with the program. qpack - uses code supplied with the program. sentry 2.05 - programs depacked by modifing and running depacker spectrum 512 - uses a routine a found on a pd disk. speed packer - programs are modified and run, datafiles use code supplied with the program. stos - uses a dissassembly of the depacker. thunder - programs are modified and run. datafiles use code supplied with the program unknown packer - uses a dissassembly of the depacker. The picture depackers for Spectrum 512 amd Degas elite were included because some art packages will not accept packed versions of these files. History before v2 Revised on 24/4/92 to depack gollum progs and fix ice depack bug. Revised on 25/4/92 to depack happy progs. Revised on 26/4/92 to depack jam packer v1 progs, lsd/jek datafiles, spectrum512 piccies. Revised on 27/4/92 to depack pompey packed prog & dat files Revised on 27/4/92 to fix anther ice depack bug (2.3 prog files did not always depack properly. Revised (again!) on 27/4/92 to depack dcsquish programs. Revised on 28/4/92 to depack 4pak programs. Revised on 29/4/92 to depack automation chunk packed files. Revised on 29/4/92 to depack old style ice packed files. Revised on 29/4/92 to depack packed degas files. Revised on 9/5/92 to work on pre tos 1.4 Revised on 11/6/92 to work on automation 501 files properly (small bug) Revised on 26/6/92 to work on ice datafiles, (my source had been corrupted!) Revised on 15/7/92 to work on what I believe is the stos packer and also a packer for which I have no clue at all to what it is called but was used to pack concerto on st formats coverdisk 37. its an appallingly bad packer anyway so who cares. i would strongly advise anyone using the stos packer to discontinue using it for two reasons : - firstly it's a bad packer! - secondly and more importantly is that it relocates its depacker to $7fd00 which on a 520st is just below the screen ram but on any other machine it is in the middle of no mans land. since most people with a meg or more generally use that ram this depacker has a habit of trashing whatever is there, especially with me because the first half meg of my ram is used by my harddisk driver, cache, replacement desktop and desktop accessories. You have been warned! Revised on 21/7/92 to work on thunder packed progs (cheers keith!) Revised on 21/7/92 (again) to work on dcsquish v1.0 & 1.2 packed progs. (I was bored!) Revised on 24/7/92 to work on pfx v1.0 & 1.2 packed progs. fire v1 packed programs and datafiles Revised on 25/7/92 to fix yet more ice bugs. and to work on ivory dragon packed progs/datafiles. Revised on 26/7/92 to update routines to unpack pompey pirates stuff. also to fix clashes between atom files. extra bytekiller compatibility added as well, phew! Revised on 29/7/92 to work on pompey 2.6 packed files. Revised on 07/8/92 to work on a packer used by superior although it may not be a new packer as such but a old version of fire or ice with a new header. Revised on 09/8/92 to work on thunder v1 packed program files.Also pompey v2.3 and 3.0 progfiles. And speed packer 2 progs and data. Revised on 18/8/92 to work on BAPACKED progs and pompey 1.9x progs. Revised on 24/8/92 to handle an extra PFX packed format and Qpack progs. Revised on 10/9/92 to depack sentry v2.05 packed programs History after v2 Version 2 (beta) completed on 29/09/1992. Version 2 release completed on 11/10/1992 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- The full 68000 source (devpac2) is also available for œ5.00. It's fully commented and would be useful if you are learning 68000 as there are no tricky bits in it. Only calls to the O.S are used. Address If you want to contact me to send packers, programs or anything else you think i'd be interested in then my address is - Mike Watson, 42 Gilmore Place, Edinburgh, Scotland Please include a disk, SAE/IRC's to gaurantee the next version and a speedy reply. Please mention the version number as well if you find any bugs! Only contact me for legal reasons though. I really am fed up with people sending me or asking me for cracked s/w. I don't have and don't want any, OK! Mike Watson - 29/09/1992