A 1995 point-and-click adventure, written in Brisbane by two people, in its GOG
edition: 45 files, 237,605,368 bytes, of which one file of 190,787,021
bytes is the game and contains no index of itself. The table that says where
its 7,671 resources begin and end is compiled into scummvm.exe, a free
program written by other people twenty-two years later, and there are sixteen
such tables in there. Five of the wrong ones describe this file with no hole and
no overlap.
This repository measures the object and does not run it.
| installation | 45 files, 237,605,368 bytes, 13 directories |
| the game | queen.1, 190,787,021 bytes, sha1 9d72260be4d653efb344223abd5227219c158ef6 |
| compressed | nothing; 0 of 2,911 64 KiB blocks above 7.5 bits, mean 5.7112 |
| the index | 7,671 records inside scummvm.exe, chosen by content — coverage 100.000000 %, 0 holes, 0 overlaps, 0 duplicate names |
| the layers | game 80.2959 % · ScummVM 2.0.0 16.1584 % · GOG shop 2.2776 % · Inno Setup 1.2682 % |
| recorded sound | 6,749 resources, 170,238,763 bytes = 89.2297 %, decoded to 4 h 16 m 13.662 s at the engine's 11,025 Hz |
| pictures | 129 PCX, 281 frame banks holding 5,266 frames, 65 depth masks, 63 light ramps — 9.8719 % |
| music | 5 resources, 259 Standard MIDI files, 0.5701 %, and nought seconds of recording |
| the written work | 626,243 bytes = 0.328242 %; QUEEN.JAS alone is 1 part in 2,395.56 |
| the script | 27,575 words, in a game that takes 170 megabytes to say them |
| the voices | twelve credited actors, forty-three characters, one director, one mixer |
| absolute paths in the object | 0 (42 raw, all waveform) |
| leftovers | 4,014,943 bytes = 1.6898 %, including a backup file with its own index entry |
| descriptors | three, covering 100.000000 %, 82.2422 % by mass, and nothing respectively |
| dates in the object | 1990, 1994, 1995, 2017, 2018 — and none of them the year on the box |
| against the collection | 23 hash lists, 0 crossings |
| predictions | 58 clauses, 34 hit, 11 half, 13 miss |
| 00 | The predictions: fifty-eight bets, written before the object was opened |
| 01 | The object: one file that does not contain its own index |
| 02 | The spec sheet: every number with the command that makes it again |
| 03 | The table: how a beautiful wrong answer is beaten by an ugly test |
| 04 | The bundle: 7,671 records, 100.000000 %, and three extensions that lie |
| 05 | The speech: 6,749 recordings, four hours sixteen minutes, and one borrowed number |
| 06 | The names: when you print a set of labels, ask what they label |
| 07 | The pictures: 538 resources, 9.87 %, and two equations that close |
| 08 | The music: 259 scores, half a megabyte, and nought seconds of recording |
| 09 | The Amiga inside the DOS disc: 375 AMOS banks and an engine called JASPAR |
| 10 | The text and the two colophons: 27,575 words, and a credit roll that shipped twice |
| 11 | The layers and the clocks: four bodies of software, eight timestamps, and no product year |
| 12 | The shop's descriptor: two records out of forty-five, and 82.24 % of the bytes |
| 13 | The paths, the scans that shout, and the machine that is not part of the object |
| 14 | The leftovers: 4,014,943 bytes, 1.6898 %, and a backup file with an index entry |
| 15 | The thesis: 79,642 bytes of work and 170,238,763 bytes of one performance of it |
| 16 | The tools: 200 on disk, twelve written, 84 that do not apply |
| 17 | Open questions |
| 18 | Corrections: eleven in the briefing, three of mine |
| 19 | The scoring: 34 hit, 11 half, 13 miss |
A table that closes arithmetically can be the wrong table. Six tables inside
scummvm.exe describe queen.1 with zero holes and zero overlaps, and five of
them are other countries' editions of the same game. The best-looking wrong one
covers 99.9703 % and leaves a 56,643-byte tail that looks exactly like a
discovery. It is the German CD's table, silently truncated at the first record
that would have run past the end of the English file. What separates the right
one from the wrong ones is not arithmetic but content: a .PCX begins with the
byte 0A, and on the winner 128 of 128 do, and on every other table in the
executable, none.
Eighty-nine per cent of a game can be one performance of it. The recorded speech is 170,238,763 bytes and four hours sixteen minutes; the whole written work — logic, script, dialogue, cutscenes, credits — is 626,243, and the game's own data file is 79,642. Delete the speech and the game still runs, with subtitles, as it did on floppy a year earlier. Delete the 79,642 bytes and there is nothing left but a stranger's voice.
A descriptor reconstructed by strangers can be better than the original. The
index in scummvm.exe covers this file at 100.000000 % with no holes, no
overlaps and no duplicate names, which is more complete than any descriptor this
collection has measured from inside an object. It is better because its authors
had a larger model: they were not describing this file, they were describing
sixteen editions at once, and that forced them to get every boundary right
sixteen times.
Nothing here was executed — not ScummVM, not the installer, not the
uninstaller. Nothing was contacted. PCX, ZIP, PDF, PE, Standard MIDI,
Shell Link and the ScummVM queen.tbl record layout are public formats, used as
published and said so on each occasion; the sound container, the frame banks,
the AMOS banks, the depth masks, the light ramps and the music index were
derived from the bytes and each derivation is printed with the arithmetic that
closes it. The single number in this repository that is imported rather than
measured is the 11,025 Hz sample rate, which is named as imported everywhere it
is used.
Three identifiers belonging to the machine this copy was installed on are
counted and never written; tools/leakcheck.py reads all three out of the
object and proves that none of them appears in any committed file.
No decoded asset from the object is in this repository — no audio, no images, no MIDI, no manual. The measurements are here; the game is not.