WC3 Memory Glitch Got A Clever Cover Up (October 21, 2017)

KrisV

KrisV

Administrator
There’s a well known anecdote from the development of WC1 that talks about how an error message when quitting the game was changed to “Thank you for playing Wing Commander.” That story now has a sequel thanks to a tweet by WC3 programmer Robin Todd! In this case, there was a random crash that was changed to resemble a CD-ROM error. Apparently blaming the new-fangled optical technology was an easy solution, and, fortunately, this error was never prolific and didn’t negatively affect the player experience. It makes a great bit of trivia now!

on Wing Commander 3 we had random memory crash. no time to fix. we re-wrote DOS error table so resulting output would be "CD-ROM read error"
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Original update published on October 21, 2017
 
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I don't know that I ever got this one. Still, fascinating to learn of these little hacks and work-arounds. Remember, this is before the days of the 'oh, let's release whatever we have working now, we can always patch it later' mentality. (Not belittling the hard-work developers do, being one of them, but often management put in unreasonable deadlines...)
 
Yeah, I'm with Wedge. Unfortunate for anyone who got this and thought they had a CD problem, but it doesn't stand out in my mind at all as anything people encountered very often.
 
I always wondered, since the error strings were re-written internally, in theory, one could see those error messages after playing Wing Commander and then doing something else. So if you were playing another game, if it caused the same EMM386 error, it would print "Thanks for playing Wing Commander" as well. Wonder if people thought it was strange or if their PC was infected when that happened.

Or in this case, getting "CD-ROM Read error" in a program that never even knew about it.

Of course, it would all go away if you rebooted.
 
Was it EMM386, or was it some piece of middleware that was part of Wing Commander I? The original game should've had its own memory manager since it was designed to run on a 286.
 
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