Maupiti Island Patch
I recently started playing Maupiti Island, a mystery adventure game developed and published by Lankhor. It was originally released for Amiga in 1990, and then for MS-DOS and Atari ST in 1991. It is available for download from Lankhor.net with permission from the rights holders.
Unfortunately, the MS-DOS version available in English does not work correctly. You can read or look at items in the starting room, but if you do this anywhere else, the game will freeze. (I assumed this meant you could only examine the items found in that room, but I later learned from Dronon1 that you can bring other items back there to look at them. An interesting, but tedious, workaround.)
When I first ran into this freezing bug, I found a post by Nowhere Girl on MobyGames about the same issue. Even better: there was a link to a patch! Unfortunately, the link to slightly-deranged.com was no longer working, so it was a dead end.
After some digging, I found a post by themabus on Abandonia.com (archived version) describing the problem, as well as a fix:
i was playing this game long, long ago in dos and i liked it very much and i think it was the same copy everyone has - with the same crash
and back then i belive ive found the cause, it is an infinite loop, maybe because of cracker error removing cp, i don’t know, but i think originally game was bound to floppy structure, maybe bad sectors or something weird
and here is how to patch it
maupan.exe (56,586bytes)
offset:from:to
00008B0B:75:90
00008B0C:CC:90
this will prevent crash but does it break game logic somehow i don’t know, i could never finish the game
but i hope more people will be able to enjoy it, it’s a bit sad it is rated so low, it is really quite a great little game
I used HexFiend to patch the game with these instructions. HexFiend doesn’t support hexadecimal offsets, so I converted those values to decimal (35595 and 35596) and made the changes. It worked! But themabus had never finished the game, so I remained concerned about whether the changes introduced new problems.
Fortunately, stephematishun found an archived version of the slightly-deranged.com post and noticed that it was written by Agustín Cordes. The link to the patch itself wasn’t working, but the post made it clear that Agustín had played the game multiple times using the patch—so it was a patch that was confirmed to work correctly. I contacted Agustín on Twitter. He was kind enough to dig up the patch on an old hard drive and share it with me.
After downloading Agustín’s patch, I compared it with the patch I had done manually. The files were identical, confirming that themabus’s instructions left the game in a fully playable state.
Download the Patch
- maupiti-patch.zip (31KB Zip Archive)
To install it, just replace your existing maupan.exe with the patched version. If you’d like to verify the download, or manually patch the game yourself, the expected hashes for the patched maupan.exe are below.
SHA-256: 5c002644389459a9ac63c83fec8b70d478949d37c78ba5373190a18f0f2a3b42 MD5: 0a695ca513753bc18a85a9e6ced33355