As promised, It's time to reveal the technical story behind the Syndicate Wars Port. The story is divided into two parts - the first, and the second attempt to port this game. Comments are welcomed!

Syndicate Wars is a game published in 1996, created by Bullfrog. The game was written in C (Watcom) for the DOS4GW DOS extender. And of course it has stopped working natively (i.e. without emulators like DOSBox) when the modern operating systems, like GNU/Linux or Windows NT series, emerged. A few years ago my friend, Unavowed, told me about proposition of a project to create a port of Sydicate Word for modern OS'es like the two previous one I've mentioned. The port was to be done by decompiling the original executable file, locating all the functions from the standard C library, locating the DOS4GW and I/O (sound, keyboard, gfx, mouse, etc) dependencies, replacing them with modern native libc function call and libSDL/OpenAL libraries (sometimes using simple wrappers, other times by creating converters), and finally, recompiling it all to form native executables for the modern systems. Yesterday, we've (it was Unavowed who was the clear leader of this project) finished this project, and we've published executables, not only for GNU/Linux and Windows, but also for Mac OSX :)

Finally has arrived the day when I take a look at creating OS X GUI applications! Applications on Mac are usually created using Objective C language (which I didn't have the pleasure to meet yet) and the Cocoa API (OS X equivalent of WinAPI; there was once also a Carbon API for Mac OS). From a programmers point of view, the Objective C syntax has really caught my eye - it's really very interesting! But I admit, from a reverse-engineers point of view Objective C gets* even better ;>

As my readers may know, for some time now I have access to a MacBook with OS X. Finally I found some time to test the standard exploiting techniques on OS X. I must admit that OS X surprised me positively once or even twice. However, this post is about another time, when the surprise was not positive in terms of security, additionally, it was kinda funny (in a hermetic way) ;>

The story starts as usual. I've been writing a certain application, that generates some test files. The files were very similar in structure, so I took the common factor out, and created a function that creates the common base of the file, and then, made a few functions that make modification to this base, and then the file is written (file shared, only in GF 15200 GTX! ;>). Of course, every modification function that I made, I had to add to a list of function in another part of the source file. And I've added each 'shader' function I created to that list. After 38th function I've grew tired of this...

The guys at Apple seem to like old tools. Last night we worked with Unavowed on some project (I'll write about it another time) - to be more accurate, we tried to to port the project to Mac OS X - and we've stumble on an obstacle. The obstacle told us it was called Apple Inc version cctools-698.1~1, GNU assembler version 1.38. And yes, that is the default assembler (as) used on the current Mac OS X, and I certainly hope that 1.38 is just a different version naming schema, since the current version (according to wiki) is 2.19, my MinGW says it uses 2.18.50, in the year 2000 version 2.11 was released, and in the current project changelog the oldest entry tells about version 1.93.01 - that would make 1.38 reaaaally old.