Wolfenstein 3D (3DO, USA, 1995) — a documentation pass over one pressing

One CD-ROM, read end to end and written up. The disc is not in this repository and never will be; everything here is a measurement of it, and every figure carries the command that makes it again.

object	Wolfenstein 3D (USA).chd, 58,013,447 bytes, sha1 6c335bea22b365379dc9f5b2f0cf0ee0f5b2d933
pressing	one MODE1_RAW track, 56,702 sectors, 17.0276 % of a 74-minute CD
denominator	116,125,696 bytes of user data (56,702 × 2,048)
file system	Opera — not ISO 9660. 197 files, 22 directories, 87,529,786 bytes = 75.3750 %
volume	declares 56,320 blocks = 110 MiB exactly; 382 sectors past it, all zero
mastering fill	iamaduck, 13,379 sectors = 23.5953 %, in one free region
thesis	59.7896 % recorded music and sound — 13:01.51 of 44.1 kHz stereo AIFF-C plus 42 effects
video	11,673,600 bytes of Data Streamer, Cinepak, two logo films at 10 and 12 frames/s
binaries	37 ARM Image Format images; entry point 0x100 on 37 of 37; 20 compressed, all the SDK's
identified	71.1132 % of the user area is a format derived on this disc
names published	21, all of them drawn in pixels, plus two build logins
studio / publisher	Logicware / Interplay — both count zero as strings

It is the third 3DO disc in this collection, after Crash 'n Burn (1993) and Super Street Fighter II Turbo (1994). What is true of the platform lives in 3do-platformnotes-doc; what is true of this title lives here.

What a third disc was for

Two discs had produced sixty claims marked [2 of 2] — a rule invented out of two points. A third disc is the first thing that can break one, and this one broke six of them, deleted an explanation, and corrected a [2 of 2] that had never been checked with a hash. It also carries three formats neither previous disc had:

• the Data Streamer, which the platform notes had marked [deleted] for two discs and which turns out to be Cinepak — spelled cvid, in lower case, in a field nobody had counted. 07, 08;
• APPSCRN, the banner screen, an open question since the first disc. This disc has one and it is the SDK's untouched placeholder: the console shows FICTIONAL DEVELOPER presents BOGUS TITLE. 10;
• BRGR, an archive format holding 368 members, ninety of them playable maps, and cels with sixteen of their twenty control-block fields thrown away. 11, 12.

And one thing nobody was looking for: /rom_tags is a table of 32-byte records, and one of them is a date. Three discs, three values, monotone in press order, all three landing in 1993–1995 under a 1904 epoch — with the first twenty-five days before its disc's documented release. 14.

The chapters

00	predictions, written before the disc was opened. Scored 50.0 of 58
01	what the object is and what the denominator is
02	the technical sheet, one command per line, with an Engine section
03	the Opera reader ran unchanged for the third time, and the case bit found a referee
04	all 56,702 sectors, and an arithmetic that closes to 0.00
05	STARTOPERA rev 1.27, peabody, and a script that lost three steps
06	a compression test that was firing on twenty images, and the first toolchain banner on the platform
07	the Data Streamer container, derived
08	cvid, 550 frames decoded, and two company names in moving pictures
09	the thesis: 59.7896 %, and why Red Book was never the question
10	APPSCRN, and an open question closed three ways
11	BRGR: 368 members, slack zero, and 3.02 % honestly unknown
12	ninety maps, six episode titles, and a filename that disagrees with its own sign
13	twenty-one names, and the personal-data decisions
14	/signatures, /rom_tags, and a date nobody knew was there
15	the SDK across 27 months, and a font that ate 90 % of the growth
16	three discs of one console, and which series are lines
17	eight errors in the brief, seven in the platform notes, five of mine
18	the scoring, and why an overshoot this large is a problem
19	28,595,910 bytes nobody chose, and what is still open

The lists

notes/ carries the raw measurements, including the three hash lists the platform notes require:

notes/sha1-all.txt      197 records, SHA-1 first, then size, then path
notes/copies-list.txt   77 records, one per copy the directory records declare
notes/cel-list.txt      20 records, one per cel: geometry, depth, flags, PDAT hash
notes/rez-members.txt   368 records, one per archive member

plus chd.txt, label.txt, listing.txt, sectors.txt, copies.txt, casediff.txt, aif.txt, aif-stub.txt, aif-entropy.txt, stream.txt, rez.txt, audio.txt, thesis.txt, account.txt, entropy.txt, sdkdiff.txt, crossall.txt and strings-count.txt.

The tools

tools/ holds 313 Python programs, of which 35 are for this platform. Fourteen were written for this disc:

streamread.py   the Data Streamer container, with five negative controls
filmprobe.py    which words of a chunk vary across a file and which do not
stripwalk.py    do the FRME payloads walk as Cinepak strips
subwalk.py      does a strip's size word include its own header (818 of 818: yes)
cvidmovie.py    decode the frames, and a contact sheet
sndsread.py     the SNDS half, the stream clock, and a WAV
appscrn.py      the banner screen
rezread.py      the BRGR archive
rezcel.py       the headless cels inside it
aifprobe.py     what an AIF's branch at offset 0 actually points at
aifstub.py      the appended decompressor, and its length
aifentropy.py   compressed data against ARM code, two statistics
pixorder.py     five candidate framebuffer orders, rendered and scored
copylist.py     one record per declared copy

and aifcensus.py and account3do.py were corrected. Every tool that reads a format has a validate mode whose negative controls must fail before anything is censused.

Rules

No network, nothing executed, the .chd never modified. Public formats — CHD, AIFF-C, SDX2, ARM Image Format, the CCB, Cinepak — are used from their public definitions, and this repository says so where it does. Everything else — the Data Streamer, APPSCRN, BRGR, the headless cels, the rom_tags records — is derived from the bytes here, or declared not derived with a list of what was tried.