pc-residentevil-doc

A measurement of one CD-ROM: the European PC edition of Resident Evil, published in 1997 by Virgin Interactive Entertainment (Europe) Ltd from a game Capcom Co., Ltd made for the PlayStation in 1996.

The object is Resident Evil (Europe).bin, 736,133,664 bytes, and it is the disc rather than a copy of its files: 312,982 physical sectors of 2,352 bytes with no remainder, sync patterns and Reed-Solomon parity included. It was never mounted. Everything here was read out of it sector by sector, and every figure in these documents carries the command that re-derives it.

The disc itself is not in this repository and never will be.

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The short sheet

image	736,133,664 bytes; sha1 d664a7ad9203ac12ce400f63fb3bd03cf209a2db
geometry	312,982 sectors of 2,352, Mode 1, remainder zero
frame, censused whole	sync 312,982/312,982 · EDC 312,982/312,982 · ECC P and Q 312,982/312,982 · 0 mismatches of any kind
frame cost	95,146,528 bytes = 12.9252 % of the image, of which 86,383,032 is parity
filesystem	one ISO 9660 volume, no Joliet, 47 directories, 3,436 files, 634,776,465 bytes
descriptor	GEAR VERSION 4.0 APRIL 1996 / Res_Evil / ELEKTROSON 1996; publisher, application and copyright fields blank; expires in the year 2997
layers	game /HORR 95.8560 % · DirectX 2.5632 % · card drivers 1.1182 % · root 0.4626 %
media	27 .AVI Cinepak 320×240, 12,598 frames, 1,199.7988 s · 1,110 .WAV PCM, 5,027.658866213 s, closed to 0.000000000 s
the port	2,601 TIM textures and 828 TMD models validated inside a Win32 product; 1,112 .PAK files decompressed, 1,112 of 1,112 closing as a TIM with residue zero
dates	1,102 distinct timestamps over 129 days, 1995-07-10 to 1997-08-22 — the first object in this collection whose filesystem dates the work rather than the copy
crossings	13, after eight sessions of zero; every one is a driver or a runtime, none is game data
leftovers	11,533,102 bytes, 1.8169 %
slack	3,599,471 bytes, 100 % zero, 0 dirty files of 3,436
personal data	0 identifiers of this machine; 1 personal address in 2 occurrences, counted and not written
predictions	62 clauses written before the object was opened: 36 hit, 17 half, 9 miss = 44.5 of 62 = 71.8 %

The four things worth knowing

The clocks are Tokyo's and the label is Europe's. 2,638 of the 2,638 file records whose time is not midnight carry an even seconds field, which is FAT and nothing else — while the 47 directory records, written by the mastering program on the day of the burn, are even on only 25, which is chance. Two populations, one volume, one field. And four of the five programs in the root carry a recorded time exactly nine hours ahead of their own linker timestamp, to within fifteen seconds. Nine hours ahead of UTC is Japan. The timezone byte on all 3,436 records says GMT+01:00 and is wrong about every one of them.

Capcom converted the media and kept the model. Every recording of the world on this disc is in a PC format — Cinepak in RIFF/AVI, PCM in RIFF/WAVE — and every description of the world is in the PlayStation's. Zero bytes of film or speech sit in a PlayStation container and zero textures or models sit in a RIFF one. The line runs exactly along the boundary of what Microsoft had already written a reader for.

The .PAK format was derived from the bytes and then looked at. Before any documentation was in hand the disc had already said it was entropy-coded, not LZ77, ending mid-byte, and that its tail had a period of forty bits with an increment of 0x0040100401 — four ten-bit fields each one greater than the last. And that the first nine bits of every file are 16, which is 10 00 00 00, which is a PlayStation TIM identifier sitting in plain sight before any decompression. All 1,112 files decompress and close with residue zero, and 28 of the 676 backgrounds turn out to be stored four pixels narrower than their own header declares — a defect that shipped, and one arithmetic alone cannot see.

The installer copies everything except the film. SETUP.EXE names 2,895 distinct files. Set against the disc, the set it never mentions is exactly the 27 .AVI files — 245,601,342 bytes, 38.69 % of the disc — and the set it names that is not there is empty.

The documents

00 — The predictions	sixty-two bets, written before a byte was read
01 — What this object is	the disc, its four layers, and why it is unlike the other twenty-eight
02 — The spec sheet	every number with the command that makes it again
03 — The frame	Mode 1, 312,982 EDCs, and why 12.9252 % is not about this disc
04 — The descriptor and the names	the year 2997, the 150, and a game whose own filename breaks 8.3
05 — The dates	the FAT seconds, the nine hours, and the day the game data lost its clock
06 — The port	3,429 PlayStation structures inside a Win32 program
07 — The backgrounds	LZW derived from the bytes up, and twenty-eight sheared rooms
08 — The film	twenty minutes of Cinepak, and the files the installer refuses to copy
09 — The voice and the music	closed to nine decimals, and the music is eight-bit
10 — The rooms	a third of them identical between scenarios, and what would not be derived
11 — The four layers	DirectX in triplicate, and drivers for a Japanese-only computer
12 — The installer and the paths	724 absolute paths, one leak, and a fourth descriptor
13 — The crossings	thirteen, after eight sessions of zero
14 — The leftovers	1.8169 %, and the first one the publisher explained in writing
15 — The thesis	68.5388 % and 59.1018 %, and the 9.4370 points between them
16 — The tools	215 in the box, 15 written today, 69 that would lie about this disc
17 — Corrections	nine errors in the briefing and nine of mine
18 — Open questions	what closed, what half-closed, and the five things the disc would not say
19 — The scoring	36 hit, 17 half, 9 miss, and what the misses have in common

notes/ holds the raw output of the tools that produced the figures, and tools/ holds the 215 programs, of which 15 were written for this object.

Rules this repository was written under

• the disc is never committed, and neither is anything decoded from it — no audio, no video, no image, no model. They are measured, counted and described, and they stay in an ignored working directory;
• nothing was executed. Not the game, not the installer, not a driver. The image was never mounted; it was read as sectors;
• no network was contacted. The thirteen URLs the disc contains are reported as strings;
• the predictions were written first, with Write, before any tool was pointed at the object, and they are not edited afterwards;
• every figure names its layer and its denominator. There are two of the latter — 736,133,664 bytes of image and 634,776,465 bytes of files — and mixing them silently would change most percentages on this page;
• where a public definition was used it says so: ISO 9660, ECMA-130, RIFF/AVI, RIFF/WAVE, Cinepak, PE, NE, SZDD, the PlayStation TIM and TMD formats, and the published description of the .PAK LZW variant. Everything else was derived from the bytes or declared underived, with the failed attempts written down;
• one person's e-mail address is in this object and is not in this repository. It is counted. tools/leakcheck.py derives it from the disc and proves it reaches no committed file, without printing it.