Wrong composer, but I very recently managed to reverse engineer the music driver for Dune (or two out of four, at least).

Here's the AdLib/SoundBlaster Pro version of the track Morning played by a reverse engineered driver, rendered by nukeykt's Nuked-OPL3.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0l_CYH4njw

Well open the Pico8 game, start it and you’ll see it mixes patterns (and imagery perhaps) of original Dune and this Dune II. So partially right, but start a game on the pico8, listen, and you’ll figure it is a version of the same Dune theme.

There's nothing "natural" about the Fahrenheit scale either. Fahrenheit took the Rømer scale, multiplied it by 4 and rounded it off a bit.

I've been slowly reverse engineering Cryo's Dune, coded by Rémi Herbulot in assembler, and the code is both brilliant and insane.

Every function (to the extent that you can call it a function in assembler) is manually tail call optimized, often to the point of just doing fallthrough by placing functions after each other.

All arguments and return values are passed in registers and flags. Sometimes I'm investigating where a pointer in the SI or DI register came from and I'll have to trace back through several function layers that just didn't touch those registers to find the place it was set. When you're looking at a function, all registers and flags are potential return values.

Everything is hardcoded, all the resource id's are fixed, extracting things from the resources files requires that you know what's where. In the file ATTACK, entries 0–52 are sprites, 53-55 are palettes, and he does math on the id's to find the previous/next one (dec/inc).

Some of the resource files are compressed, which you can tell by checksumming the 6 byte header. If the header bytes add to 0xAB and the third byte is zero, it's compressed.

In the video decoder, there are chunks for sound that start with SD, chunks for palette updates that start with PL, and chunks for frame data which are identified by them /not/ having a chunk identifer. That saves a whole 2 bytes per frame!

The globe renderer is a work of art, the room renderer constructs the game backgrounds from sprites, lines and polygons with randomly dithered coloring – although his implementation of the Bresenham line algorithm is slightly broken :). In the CD version the game has lipsync data embedded in the audio files.

I built in 8086 emulator just to help me reverse engineer this game…

Music for Real Airports is one of the albums I put on to block out the world when I’m trying to get work done.

> Fortunately `f64::parse` accepts a strict superset of JSON number grammar

Just for the sake of completeness, and not to imply that you don't know this, but the JSON spec doesn't limit the size or precision of numbers, although it allows implementations set other limits.

I have encountered JSON documents that (annoyingly) required the use of a parser with bigint-support.

> but the JSON spec doesn't limit the size or precision of numbers, although it allows implementations set other limits.

This actually led to a data-loss causing bug in the AWS DynamoDB Console's editor a couple of years ago. IIRC, the temporary fix was to fail if the input-number couldn't be represented by a 64-bit float. Can't remember if it ever got a proper fix.

On the other hand, about a decade ago I sent them a feature patch to support multipage tiff images and they sent me a Christmas card for a couple of years, so my impression of them is pretty god.

I've stopped going to Ars Technica exactly because their cookie pop-up lets me know that Condé Nast wants to share my data with at least (according to the popup) 159 partners.

They have so many "partners" that their cookie popup comes with a search bar.

56 of their "partners" want my precise geolocation data!

16 "partners" want to actively scan my device!

101 "partners" want to "match and combine data from other data sources" (I can't disable or object to this)

102 "partners" want to identify my device. I also can't object to this.

The only way I can really object is to close the tab, so that's what I do.

> The only way I can really object is to close the tab, so that's what I do.

Isn't it too late by then?

Legally no, they can't store his data if he doesn't click yes.

Considering their consent banner isn't legal under GDPR anyway, I'd be wary of expecting them to be compliant with that either.

I've been entertaining myself lately by reverse engineering Cryo's Dune. I've got all graphics resources (videos, sprites, rooms) decoded, and I have recreated most of the intro (which exercises a good deal of engine).

I also made an interactive Dune globe renderer (in WASM and Rust!): https://thomas.fach-pedersen.net/dune/globe/

It should be pixel accurate to the in-game one, although I haven't validated it lately.

It's very slow going though. The original game was coded in highly optimized idiosyncratic 8086 assembly. It's difficult to read, much more so than compiler-generated machine code from the same era.

May be it could be added to ScummVM if you progress far enough!

There's no general purpose virtualization involved in ScummVM. It's a collection of game engines derived mostly from reverse engineering old games.

Oh, well I stand corrected.

Most game engines have scripting languages built in.

Yes, but those game engines are - on iOS especially - locked in to running bundled scripts that drive the specific game you’ve purchased from the App Store. ScummVM is running externally provided scripts.