Reverse engineering of the Warlords

Tools

Spice86

A PC emulator for real mode reverse engineering.

The Warlords game launches into a first screen and then the tool crashes. This was however good enough for reverse engineering of how .PCK images files are loaded and decompressed. I used the "Debug" mode to step thru the game code. Breakpoints on various conditions are quite useful, especially with --VerboseLogs switch.

I had to push one fix to Spice86: https://github.com/OpenRakis/Spice86/pull/1177

Installation:

The tool must be cloned locally and compiled by dotnet (you must install one):

dotnet build

Execution:

Spice86/src/Spice86/bin/Debug/net8.0/Spice86 \
    --Debug \
    --AudioEngine Dummy \
    --InitializeDOS \
    --VerboseLogs \
    -e /Applications/Warlords.app/Contents/Resources/game/WARLORDS.EXE

dosbox-x

DOSBox-X is an open-source DOS emulator for running DOS applications and games.

The Warlords game runs nicely.

Execution:

Run dosbox-x from the terminal! It enables the Debugger - I discovered this quite late in the process. I used it to dump the palette from VGA.

/Applications/dosbox-x.app/Contents/MacOS/dosbox-x

Then in the DOS:

MOUNT C /Applications/Warlords.app/Contents/Resources/game/
C:
WARLORDS.EXE

To start debugging, use Menu to "Start DOSBox-X Debugger" (must be launched from the terminal).