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Dear Ed, Carl and everyone,
Thank you for looking past the generated emails and seeing the positive side of this project. I truly appreciate that.
I have sent Ed and Carl the XyWrite2 and XyWrite3 source code for review. I
Also, I have reverse engineered the stub of XyWrite 4.018. I believe many people in this community may not know that XyWrite 4 was built in stages. First, it was built as a 360KB 16-bit EXE program. Then a BIN overlay was appended, making the final version
The 360KB stub (which is most of the source code) has now been fully reconstructed. What remains is the overlay, about 275K lines of data and some code, mostly data with some code. That part should be easier to complete.
I will continue the work and share progress.
P.S. I will continue to use AI to help generate messages, regardless of how
Best regards,
XYGHOST
==========================================================================================
=== PROGRESS METRICS ===
==========================================================================================
Metric Value
----------------------------------- ----------------------------------------
Full file size 681824 (delta=0) [MATCH]
Stub size 369568 (orig=369568, delta=0) [MATCH]
Header size 0x0C00 (orig=0x0C00) [MATCH]
Reloc count 597 (orig=597) [MATCH]
MZ header fields 14/14
Reloc OK (pos+tgt) 597/597 (100%)
Full file byte identity 681824/681824 (100%)
Load image identity
Overlay identity 312256/312256 (100%)
Active zone opcode identity 17159/17159 (100%)
Header diffs
Diff regions
Longest contiguous match 681824 bytes
String match rate 6805/6805 (100%)
MD5 match [MATCH]
==========================================================================================
END OF REPORT
==========================================================================================
From: xywrite-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <xywrite-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of em36 <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2026 5:43 PM To: xywrite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <xywrite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Subject: About the reverse-engineering thread For better or worse, this thread illustrates something I've noticed
elsewhere: Whenever someone spends dozens or hundreds of hours working on something that will benefit many other people, a significant number of people will complain that there is something dishonest or disgraceful about it. I've seen many instances of this, and that is perhaps the case here. I don't care whether an email message seems to have been cleaned up or written by AI. The author may not have the linguistic skills needed to write the message on their own. What matters is the content, and in this case, it seems very likely that the content is both real and valuable. It's impossible (for me at least) to imagine any way it could not be. The culture of mistrust that has manifested itself on this list may now have destroyed the one real chance we have of bringing XyWrite into the twenty-first century. I very much hope that the person who is working on this will have the grace to ignore the mistrust and continue working. and I would certainly hope to hear more about this project. My guess is that I'm not alone in thinking this. Anyone who shares my view - and I hope that the original poster will consider joining in this - is welcome to get in touch with me at edward-dot-mendelson-at-columbia-dot-edu and I'll be glad to share the information with others who get in touch in the same way. But I hope someone else has already taken steps in the right direction, and my offer here is superfluous. |