Getting old Macromedia Director games to run on modern hardware
WerWolv, writing at werwolv.net, walked through getting a German point-and-click game from the early 2000s, “Findus bei den Mucklas,” running under Wine on a modern Linux machine. The disc images came from archive.org as CloneCD files, and the first obstacle was the disc itself: several files appeared twice, once real and once as a 0 or 256 byte decoy, so extracting the right set took several tools and manual picking.
The game turned out to be a Macromedia Director Projector executable, a Director runtime with a .dxr movie file concatenated onto the end. Using ProjectorRays, a disassembler and decompiler for those files, WerWolv dumped the embedded script and found the CD check written in Lingo, with original function and variable names intact. The offsets inside the appended file are absolute, so an –offset option was added to the ProjectorRays CLI and submitted upstream.
Patching a single jmpifz instruction by hand in ImHex got past the first check. A second check called initdisplay() in optgraph.dll, which was patched in Ghidra to a MOV and a RET. A Python script applies both patches to the German release.
See more at werwolv.net and content on GitHub.
https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/10/20/getting-old-macromedia-director-games-to-run-on-modern-hardware/
#macromediadirector #directorprojector #german #werwolv #linux #wine #projectorrays
#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit
WerWolv, writing at werwolv.net, walked through getting a German point-and-click game from the early 2000s, “Findus bei den Mucklas,” running under Wine on a modern Linux machine. The disc images came from archive.org as CloneCD files, and the first obstacle was the disc itself: several files appeared twice, once real and once as a 0 or 256 byte decoy, so extracting the right set took several tools and manual picking.
The game turned out to be a Macromedia Director Projector executable, a Director runtime with a .dxr movie file concatenated onto the end. Using ProjectorRays, a disassembler and decompiler for those files, WerWolv dumped the embedded script and found the CD check written in Lingo, with original function and variable names intact. The offsets inside the appended file are absolute, so an –offset option was added to the ProjectorRays CLI and submitted upstream.
Patching a single jmpifz instruction by hand in ImHex got past the first check. A second check called initdisplay() in optgraph.dll, which was patched in Ghidra to a MOV and a RET. A Python script applies both patches to the German release.
See more at werwolv.net and content on GitHub.
https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/10/20/getting-old-macromedia-director-games-to-run-on-modern-hardware/
#macromediadirector #directorprojector #german #werwolv #linux #wine #projectorrays
#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit
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