okay so when you start a game (well, technically when you restart), the game rolls 3 dice:
0-31: where the shit was stolen from
0-2: which item it is from that location
0-8: whodunnit

like if you roll 0 on the first, you get Athens.
For the second one, it's:
0: mask of Priam
1: Achilles's heel
2: sibyl's secret.

The last die is used as a lookup table into the dossier's list.
It's got 1 added to it so you won't get Carmen Sandiego, as a rookie at least.

so the game uses a pattern like this:
char * RANKS="Rookie\0Sleuth\0Private Eye\0Investigator\0Ace Detective\0"

and then latter they do:

char* your_rank = select_string(RANKS, player->rank);

and select_string is a confusing function to reverse engineer, but knowing the name I gave it gives it away: it advances through the list until it's on the nth string and returns it

there is no check for going past the end.

so probably it uses the same trick for pronouns. The string I'm seeing is probably like: "He\0Him\0She\0Her\0"

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