Found Data

I'm always interested in found data. Little notes buried in executables and other strange places. These are usually intended to be seen only by those curious enough to fire up a hex editor, or do a little reverse engineering.

Here's an example. On the 68k Macintosh, executables usually only have a resource fork. All the code is stored in CODE blocks in the resource fork. So I was curious when I found that the 68k mac version of Shadowgate had a data fork. The data fork contained the following message:

Welcome to TMON!
TMON was written in the summer of 1984 by Waldemar Horwat when he was still 15 years old. Initially TMON didn't have the heap and file windows; these were added later. TMON was very valuable in debugging itself. The biggest problem in writing TMON was making sure that it will not affect the Macintosh system in undesirable ways. Although some side effects couldn't be avoided, most have been eliminated. How are you able to read this message, anyway? Do you have a disk sector reader?

It's interesting to note that Waldemar Horwat did some programming on Shadowgate. So my guess is that this is evidence that he used his TMON debugger on Shadowgate. Later revisions of Shadowgate have had this data fork removed. I also found it in Uninvited, which is another ICOM game. No sign of it in Deja Vu 1 or 2, but I haven't been able to find anything but the 1992 reissues of those games.