Pain diskmag

[Asle]

All,

 Yet another PC diskmag. This time, Pain.
 There's a lot of releases for this one. When concentrating on earlier releases (1994-1995), it seems the format in there is something close to AMF (Otto Chrons), and yet, it's not. I could locate all unconverted material but hit a snag for issue 01/95. It's a music by Big Bear ("HIT THAT GUY") which I failed to locate anywhere.
 If anyone has either the original music or an idea of what the music format is, please, tell me

Cheers
Sylvain

-- EDIT: and there's also the issue 03/95 with an unknown author "lhaysom/psd" (credited in the mag as Lhyasom) with a music "warp 6".
-- EDIT: issue 07/96 comes also with this format, for a music by Musaya / NDS called "* waterworld *"
-- EDIT: issue 09/96 also, with Phred/NDS music called "Vertical Crossdown"
-- EDIT: and now issue 11/96 with another Phred/NDS music called "autumns piano"

[deus-ex]

This appears to be some predecessor format to AMF, and also developed by Otto Chrons. In the credits of the MAG it is referenced Zwerg Zwack. Obviously it didn't spread very much and no information is available anywhere.

[Axxy]

Thought I had a look through some Pain disks back in the day, obviously not. Anywhere to download them to have a read, I did enjoy some of them back then.

Can't help with the missing ones, but I do have Phred's "autumn piano.s3m".

[Asle]

upped it. thanks

[Asle]

seems all the versions are on scene.org as it wasn't published monthly:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000817013218/http://pain.planet-d.net/

Sylvain

[Asle]

And I found this Pain0203 with a secret music. it's in pain.dat file, which is a RAR file in fact. However, it's protected with a password, which I failed to identify. Any help would be appreciated, here

[Axxy]

Having had a look through some of these diskmags, I know I must have gone through a lot them in the past. Looking at timestamps, I must have gone through them back in 2001/2002..

Can't help with the rar password unfortunately, it must be crypted in the main .exe somewhere.  I have a program for decompressing .upx binaries, but have no idea about those pk? executables or the dos expander by daredevel/tran..  how did you deal with them?.

[deus-ex]

PK = PKWare, a executable compressor for MsDOS binaries. There are several unpackers available which support this rather easy to unpack format either natively or by generic routines. The DOS expander by Daredevil & Tran = PmodeW. This extender supports compression of executables using the PmodeW expander. However compression was only optional and set to off by default. There exist unpackers for PmodeW execuatables too, both specific and generic ones.

[Asle]

Yes, there are some tools that depack PMW exe. But in these cases, I simply got sorta lucky as, sometimes, when launching the mag (in DosBox), the music is extracted by the mag and replayed. It's there in the directory, available for the taking.
This has happened each times save for some of the ones mentioned above.

[Axxy]

Yes, there are some tools that depack PMW exe. But in these cases, I simply got sorta lucky as, sometimes, when launching the mag (in DosBox), the music is extracted by the mag and replayed. It's there in the directory, available for the taking.
This has happened each times save for some of the ones mentioned above.

I tried Dosbox but unfortunately the first 3 or 4 I tried, started to run for about a fraction and then exited back to the dosbox window. I haven't really had much luck running anything old on this system, but then again I haven't got half the shyte on this machine as I had on previous ones.

Hence why I wondering about the unpackers. Maybe I would have more luck unpacking them first and then having a look through, then could probably have a look through the few old CDs and ISO's sat on my external backup drive. Probably loads on there I never rooted through properly...

Looking at the search results on google, I'm loathe to click on some links I see after searching for unpackers, just the websites names alone make me wonder what I would actually be clicking on. 

[Asle]

I have this:

Code: [Select]

PMWUNLIT.EXE v1.30
 -----------------------------------
 Decompressor for PMODE/W compressed
 executables.
 -----------------------------------
 Fixed bug when decompressing files
 with no fixups in last pages.
 -----------------------------------
 Fixed bug when compressed files
 have 16 bit fixups.
 -----------------------------------
 Fixed bug when object compressed
 size is 0.
 -----------------------------------My DOS pack/depacker collection is an old one, collected over time. I didn't have to search for anything.
I'm sure there are others around.
Hope this helps

Sylvain