pc-kingsofthebeach-doc

Kings of the Beach: Professional Beach Volleyball — Electronic Arts, 1988, MS-DOS. Measurements of an installed game directory, and the code to reproduce them. No game bytes are published here: the hashes are, the files are not.

files	59, one directory deep, no subdirectories
bytes	524,839 — one denominator, not four
distinct sha1	55 of 59 (four collapsed hashes are four of the five 23-byte batch files)
form	not a disc. An installed MS-DOS tree copied off a hard disk: no image, no cue sheet, no ISO 9660, no sectors
dates	1988-08-31 to 2002-01-29, four separate hands, none of it a copy artefact
formats derived here	.PAK (36 files, 52.8225 %), .DAT (12 files, 16.7747 %), Microsoft EXEPACK (2 files, 27.8927 %)
format not derived	0 bytes
crossings with 117 other repositories	0 of 55
smallest object this pipeline has opened	yes — against 236,804,096 bytes for the smallest VIS disc

It fits on a 720 KB floppy with 195,000 bytes to spare, and that is the method rather than a footnote: on 524,839 bytes a four-byte needle has a chance rate of 0.0000, so for the first time here a single hit is a finding and a zero is evidence. Three results rest on that, and the discipline that comes with it is printed beside every count — a two-byte needle over 204,704 bytes is still expected 3.12 times by chance and is still worth nothing.

What is in it

• a decompressor that produced exactly the right length and lost 11,184 bytes of code. The toolbox's exepack.py unpacked both overlays to their declared dest_len with residue 0 and left the first 11,184 bytes as zeros, on both files. No arithmetic on the length can see that; the packer's own relocation table can. Repaired, controlled in both directions, and declared;
• a magic number that was never a magic number. All 36 .PAK files begin 0x82 and the program never compares anything to 0x82 — zero occurrences against a chance rate of 0.0000. It is the first command byte of a run-length stream, and the geometry everyone read as a header is the first two bytes of the decompressed output;
• eight passwords stored as the one's complement of their uppercase ASCII, four of which no published walkthrough names;
• twenty-two names drawn in pixels, which is why no string search had ever found them, and which settles two 8.3 abbreviations that would have been expanded wrong;
• a Tandy build the loader offers on its own command line and that is not on the object, with three of its four data files shipping anyway;
• and four hands over fourteen years, all of it out of one find.

The chapters

00 — predictions	70 clauses written before a byte was opened; 20 inherited, 50 open
01 — the object	59 files, one denominator, what it keeps and what it lost
02 — the technical sheet	every figure with the command that reproduces it, and the byte table that closes to 0
03 — what does not apply	nine standard measurements listed rather than skipped, and two that invert
04 — the programs	a chooser, two EXEPACK overlays, and the hole the relocation table found
05 — .PAK	52.8225 %, derived from the bytes; three tools refused first, one of them badly
06 — the twelve .DAT	460 records, residue 0, and a mask whose height is the sum of two others on 70 of 70
07 — how it draws	two overlays differing in one immediate byte, and a palette that reads wrong until you notice the monitor
08 — how it sounds	an Adlib in 1988, a Tandy chip both builds drive, 39,624 four-bit samples
09 — VBTDY	a build that is named, offered, and absent — and what the object cannot say about it
10 — eight passwords	inverted ASCII, a menu entry, and five identical batch files that are somebody's notes
11 — the people	twenty-two athletes, two authors in three spellings, and a fourth hand in 2002
12 — provenance	four strata, eighteen portraits in 166 seconds, two overlays ten seconds apart
13 — protection and state	two zeros, and only one of them is about this object
14 — against the collection	0 of 55, and a checklist decision that reverses its own prediction
15 — the tools	445 files, two written or repaired here, six defects on the record
16 — leftovers	eleven open items, each with the bytes that would close it
17 — corrections	eight in the pre-briefing, four of mine, one sent elsewhere
18 — the scoring	20.00 of 20 inherited, 36.25 of 50 open, and the nineteenth calibration point

Nineteen documents, following pc-popcorn-doc's fifteen-chapter shape rather than pc-1000miglia-doc's twenty-two, with four added because three formats had to be derived and one absent build had to be argued.

The tools

tools/ holds 445 Python files. 443 arrived from pc-popcorn-doc; two are new here:

• tools/kotbpak.py — the .PAK reader, derived from the object's bytes. --census, --validate, --refuse, --render. Its refusal is controlled in both directions: 5 of 5 non-.PAK refused, and a real .PAK makes the control exit 1.
• tools/bytecross.py — copied from vis-thesecretsofhoseafreeman-doc.

and one was repaired: tools/exepack.py now restores the verbatim head and runs a relocation check on every --unpack, exiting 1 when it fails. pc-popcorn-doc produced this copy and the change matters to it — the correction is in docs/17 with the command and the offsets rather than the conclusion.

Elsewhere

The row and write-up for this object were added to pc-gamelist-doc, commit 6e95b79. Its year cell is the first in that index where the object contradicts itself in two media and both halves are right.

The PC family has no shared platform checklist, deliberately. docs/14 asks with the count in hand whether the DOS-era subset should have one — 24 of the 49 pc-*-doc repositories do MZ header arithmetic and 16 meet a DOS-era packer — and answers yes, against its own prediction, while declining to write it on the strength of one object.

What is not here

kings/ is in .gitignore in its entirety, and so is everything derived from it. The rule was verified in both directions with controls that fire, and the reason the directory is ignored whole rather than by extension is that three of its fifty-nine files have no extension at all and two of those three are 70 KB programs.