Msg: RE: About the reverse-engineering thread

Thank you for understanding.

I was curious about the overlay approach. When I peeked at your code in Gitlab before it was removed, I saw there were a lot of

When you say have the BIN files containing the overlay, is this something you have also tried to disassemble? Does its composition appear to rely on an external (custom) tool that you don’t have direct access to? Presumably, it had to be

- Kurt

From: xywrite-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <xywrite-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of xyquest xyghost
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2026 1:03 PM
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: About the reverse-engineering thread

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 hope he can report his findings and impressions to the group.

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 an>

The 360KB stub (which is

I will continue the work

P.S. I will continue to use AI to help generate messages, regardless of how some people feel. What matters is the technical work and the results. I'll let Ed and Carl report back to the group.

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 366496/366496 (100%)

Overlay identity 312256/312256 (100%)

Active zone opcode identity 17159/17159 (100%)

Header diffs 0 bytes

Diff regions 0

Longest contiguous match 681824 bytes

String match rate100%)

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.