Hi everyone, this is Week 7 of GSoC, and I’m happy to share that I’ve successfully passed the midterm evaluation 😃. As I told you in the last blog, the Amiga version of Dungeon Master is now fully playable — so we’ve decided to extend support to the DOS version as well.
I began by analysing the DOS version and found that most of the game logic is the same across both platforms. I started by adding the detection entry for the DOS English version, then added Little-Endian support in the asset loaders of the engine.
There were also differences in the graphics file format — the DOS version uses version 3.x, which has a special 2-byte signature at the start of the file to identify it as such. I added support for detecting this signature by reading the first 2 bytes of the file as a header word and checking if it has 0x8000 set, which identifies it as version 3.x, and adjusted the table start offset and bytes-per-graphic accordingly so the loader handles both formats correctly.
Sev gave me access to Coverity’s static analysis and pointed me to the issues flagged for the DM engine. I went through them one by one and found that most were false positives.
Things like null pointer dereferences or out-of-bounds accesses that Coverity flagged were in practice guarded by earlier logic in the engine — the problematic paths simply couldn’t be reached during normal execution. For those, I silenced the warnings.
A handful of the issues were genuine, and I fixed those properly.
My college has started and I had to travel back to my hostel from my hometown, so progress was a bit slow this week. I’ll make up for it this week by quickly wrapping up the remaining Coverity issues and getting back to work on the DOS version.
That’s it for this week. See you in the next one! 👋