FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
Does CARE distribute originals, cracks or hacks ?
How to reproduce CARE releases ?
Goal of this project is the reverse engineering of old retro games from the legendary Commodore Amiga and the modification of those games to own needs. This is achieved by disassembling/decompiling and analyzing the original unmodified binaries and reassembling/recompiling the created/modified sources. Well, everybody can imagine that this is a very time consuming process...
The second possibility to modify the games is to contact the authors and ask them to publish the original source code. Unfortunately in most cases they don't want to publish them, they are not contactable or the sources are lost... :-(
Another main goal is that the modified games shouldn't be a platform migration to a windows based system. The games are released for the original hardware (and - of course - can be emulated e.g. with WinUAE)...
...there are already so many games for the amiga and for other systems also...
1) Well, I don't know. Maybe it's because I have too much time. :-)
2) It's a great feeling to discover the source of games I played 15 years before and it's also great to find in-game secrets, analyzing programming and game protection techniques and so on... it's simply a good retro feeling...
3) I spent many hours with the amiga in my childhood and now I make a time travel... :-)
4) Why playing these newfangled games from today ?
- Barely no more innovative ideas
- Game copy protections that sometimes prevent the original game(!) to run...
- Buggy games are released only to reach the release date
- ...
5) I want to give some "new" software to the AMIGA community
6) It's fun - not work
7) AMIGA RULEZ
Does CARE distribute originals, cracks or hacks ? (top)
No ! CARE just distribute patch files. That means no parts of the originals are distributed. Instead we assume that you are an owner of the original game and therefore you have the CAPS project .ipf dump file or you are able to create an 100% identical one with the CAPS dump tool. Without these files the CARE patch file is just an unusable package of bits and bytes and the release can't be reproduced. Of course this limits the number of people who could play the game but remember: these games are still protected by copyright laws and that's why we are not able to offer the full game here. Maybe it's possible to find the reproduced CARE releases and/or the CAPS ipf files in the web (newsgroups/irc channels/ftps etc.) but that has nothing to do with us and CARE project.
How to reproduce CARE releases ? (top)
CARE releases can only be rebuilt on a x86 dos machine (or in a windows dos box). Please follow these steps:
- Copy these files into the same directory:
1) CAREUnpatch (x86 dos exe to reproduce the release)
2) release specific *.cpt file (CARE patch) from this web page
3) release specific *.bat file (x86 dos batch file to start) from this web page
4) the corresponding CAPS project *.ipf file
- in a dos box start the *.bat file
you will now have a *.zip file including the *.adf (AMIGA disk file) to transfer to an AMIGA disk or to emulate with e.g. WinUAE
the *.ipf and the destination *.zip file are both CRC32 checked