Ghidra is officially sexist. It'll automatically detect the word "Female" and mark it as a string, but not the word "Male"!

Why? SEXISM!

or the fact the default minimum length for strings is 5 characters, so "female" is long enough but "male" isn't.

correction: there IS a check for going over the end, it's just not used in every place select_string is called. so it's sometimes-safe

they have invented a Pronoun Markup Language.
It's \x80 for He/She
It's \x81 for he/she
It's \x82 for his/her

so a string will be "\x80 mentioned \x81 liked seafood and offered me a ride in \x82 motorcycle"
and it'll fill it out based on the pronouns of the suspect

BOOOOOOOOOOOOO

in trying to hack myself into the game, it glitched and said I had "Hobby: Male"

no... I haven't done that in ages!

I'm in the game now

I modified the game's NUM_GENDERS and found where it stores the database of criminals, so now you can find me if you search SEX=NB.

so in addition to the 5 listed attributes (and their name), the game tracks one hidden attribute:

food preference.
There are only two options:
00=Mexican
01=Seafood

what an odd binary

I'm thinking I might do a "full"(ish) disassembly of this game. I've thought for a long while (basically ever since I knew Where In North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego? existed) that there should be an SDK for making your own version of this game, for whatever arbitrary geographical area you want.

and of course there's no reason you would have to limit yourself to reality.
You could always do, like, "Where in Middle Earth is Carmen Sandiego?"

you go to Rivendell and talk to an Elf who says the perp was talking about how he wanted to collect "his precious"

I say "full" in quotes because I don't think I need to reverse the whole game to make it customizable, just enough to let you customize the locations, bad guys, hints, search types, etc.

sadly they didn't design the game as a completely empty husk that just loads datafiles. That would have been the smart thing to do, since they could then trivially make new versions.

maybe instead of fully decompiling it, I just hack it to grab data from external files, then make a tool for making those files

ahh, the PC. No one else ever thought XORing your VRAM was a good idea

turns out this version of the game has impressive support for older video cards. Here's Hercules support, which looks horrible without aspect ratio correction!

wow, this is actually the first game I've seen actually use the VGA bios call to set the VGA palette. (int 10h, AX=1012h)

everyone else just programs the VGA card directly.

so when the game starts, it loads:
ACME.DAT
CARMEN.DAT
MIDISND.DAT
DIGISND.DAT
CITIES.DAT

Interestingly, it uses the same code to load the last three, suggesting they're some kind of basic container format

starting writing code to generate a JSON file of all the various switchable info in the EXE. Things like hobbies, hair colors, locations, etc.