all makes sense, right? 16bit to 16bit!

so ghidra decompiles it as uVar1._0_1_ = 0xb0;

that's 8-bit to 8-bit! where did you get the idea this is 8bit, ghidra?

the most annoying thing?

this is picking between two strings to display, and those strings are "he" and "she".

EVEN IN 35 YEAR OLD COMPUTER GAMES I CANNOT ESCAPE GENDER PROBLEMS!

Since they devoted an entire word to gender, we can truthfully state that Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (enhanced, DOS, 1990) believes there are 65536 genders.

unfortunately due to an oversight it believes those 65536 genders are allocated as:

0: He/he/Him/him
1-65535: She/she/Her/her

I've made a note to fix this, of course.

BTW, my plan for expanding the program is simple: I'm gonna bypass a lot of code/data, by stuffing my own allocation into the memory space of carmen, which'll load extra data off the disk, in a CUSTOM.DAT file

this'll be (relatively) easy to do, since it turns out this program only needs 432 KB, since it targets a 512 KB RAM machine.
Since it's no longer 1990, I think I can safely bump that up a bit? I won't need more than another 64 KB, which means I'll just bump the game up to 496 KB memory required. Completely doable in any 640 KB or more machine!

my added code will just load the CUSTOM.DAT file off the disk, and then inject pointers to it in the rest of the program.

the applyPronouns function lets you adjust how it's encoded dynamically. Fancy!
So how it works is you do something like this:

applyPronouns("\80 was bald", 0x80, "he\0him")

and it'll return "he was bald", right? But it's more than just a simple find-replace...

Because you can do:

applyPronouns("I saw \81. \80 was bald!", 0x80, "he\0him")

and it'll return "I saw him. he was bald!".

See, you can specify multiple replacements at once, by using \x80, \x81, \x82 and so on.

The way it actually works is the game uses "He/he/Him/him" for the pronouns, so \x80 is uppercase "He", \x81 is lowercase, \x82 is uppercase "Him", and \x83 is lowercase.

trying to figure out how to properly decode the fonts in this game is REALLY reminding me why I constantly cheat with The Death Generator. Staring at a decompilation/disassembly and hex editor is no fun

it makes some sense that I'm having trouble with it. I think it's technically DOUBLECOMPRESSED

I should be able to put a breakpoint on "the palette changed"

ooh, timing NOPs. Someone figured that PCs wouldn't get any faster after 1990

I got my floppy copy in the mail, I just need to image it.

Fun fact from the box: It has a letter from the player character to their cousin, and I believe this is the only place in the game and associated media that they name your character.

It's Dale.

I also discovered that in the Amiga port, they redrew the crime computer to make it clearly an amiga. Cute!

Imaged my original disks. Two 360kb 5.25" disks.
They're laid out like this:
Disk 1:
CARMEN.EXE
CARMEN.DAT
Disk 2:
CITIES.DAT
MIDISND.DAT
DIGISND.DAT

Finally, we know the answer to the age-old question of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

The answer is "My floppy drive"