Atomic Bomberman demo

The registry has one Atomic Bomberman, the June 1997 public demo (atomic_bomberman_june_demo, below). The April 1997 alpha described first was dropped on 2026-09-22: it needed its expiry patched out of the binary (lib/app-profiles.js, 0x416e42), and the June build does everything it did plus network play. Its notes stay for anyone who digs it out again.

April 1997 alpha (no longer registered)

The tested April 7, 1997 alpha is the ready-to-run BMANDEMO tree from the local Windows 98 A-D compatibility archive documented in sources.md. That selected package contains no setup program, cabinet, or self-extractor, so launching _BOMB.EXE does not bypass an available installer. The package and all gameplay files stay local and gitignored.

Pinned SHA-256 values:

• _BOMB.EXE: 0ff14a352d6626660ceb66ea0e6743cd33c457e754cfd5705120bacae0530638
• LEVELS.DAT: 7f647eb426f93799e190b5697bec20c81d350cc5cc23b0adc9a29e2d814ad796
• README.BM: 8cf26bf5541592dae04769eb3e50a90b506214dd1941ab84b15f445faadf3433

The bundled readme describes the release as unsupported and says all rights are reserved. It grants no redistribution permission, so neither the loose tree nor the executable belongs in a public deployment.

Gameplay route

Written against the April alpha; the test now drives the June demo. test/test-atomic-bomberman-gameplay.js launches the registered browser app in headless Chromium. It waits for each publisher logo to render, skips it, and synchronizes on the title, main menu, input selection, options, and arena frames. Four Enter presses select Start Regular Game, keyboard input, the default level options, and the match.

The acceptance then holds Right, presses Space, and captures the arena before movement, after movement, with a placed bomb, and during its explosion. It requires the game to remain live, rejects browser/runtime compatibility failures, and checks rich arena pixels, visible movement, bomb placement, and explosion colors. Captures are written to build/local-candidate-smoke/atomic-bomberman/.

Run explicitly with:

node test/test-atomic-bomberman-gameplay.js

June 1997 public demo (atomic_bomberman_june_demo)

archive.org item BOMBDEMO (ATOMDEMO.zip) is the public demo, "SECOND Alpha Release - 06/02/97": BM95DEMO.EXE, 25 MB installed. It is an InstallShield 3 setup; node tools/install-atomic-bomberman-demo.js fetches the zip (or takes --zip=), checks its SHA-256, and extracts DATA.Z with tools/is3-extract.js into test/binaries/win98-games-a-d/Atomic Bomberman Demo-archive/installed/ (gitignored). Its licence allows personal copies only, so it stays local.

• ATOMDEMO.zip: ed5f2fd64e2b935ad4523a3183ebbbb23216cc56108eec1d13acc8a796110055
• BM95DEMO.EXE: 6133d5aa74df524373501028548fa3e9b28798c118bfa379dc3ad3afba1eba71

It is a Watcom build (sections BEGTEXT/DGROUP, so --section=.text finds nothing) with rdtsc profiling hooks around every function; a function entry is the inc [counter] after the previous ret, not a push ebp.

On a present-day calendar it draws "Software expired. Contact Interplay." over the game. The registry's wallClock: '1997-07-01T12:00:00Z' fixes it: test/run.js pins the calendar there (deterministic, like --wall-clock-ms), and the browser moves the real clock back a whole number of days, keeping the real time of day. Pinning an instant in the browser would break network play: the node id below is rand() seeded by srand(time()) (0x4091b8), so two players pinned to one second draw the same id.

Network play (IPX)

Menu: Start Game / Start Network Game / Join Network Game / Options / ... The socket opens only when a network item is picked, which is why the registry lan block is onDemand.

Calls: socket(AF_IPX=6, SOCK_DGRAM, 1000), bind (14-byte SOCKADDR_IPX), getsockname, SO_REUSEADDR + SO_BROADCAST, FIONBIO, then polling: ioctlsocket(FIONREAD) and, when nonzero, recvfrom(len 0x206). Everything goes to socket 0x6446 (25670), the server's announcements to node FF×6. src/09d-winsock.wat maps it onto room UDP: node 00 00 a b c d is the room address, the socket number is the port.

Packet (after the ring header [seq u32][len u16]): +0 version 0x5344 ("Network Packet Version: 21316"), +2 length, +4 sender node id, +8 message type (the handler is call [0x44db60 + type*4], 0x407823), +0xc target node id. Types seen: 0x44 server announce (59 B, carries the node name from NODENAME.INI), 0x03 join request (61 B), 0x47 join reply (20 B).

• Node id: [0x44ff0e], drawn by rand() until nonzero (0x405ea7). 0x407660 drops every packet whose sender id equals ours: two machines with one id each think the other's packets are their own echo, and the join list stays empty.
• Receive ring: 64 slots of 0x206 at [0x44e398], write index [0x44e394], read index [0x44e390], advanced (i+1) % 64 (0x427ac0). The consumer (0x427624) receives up to 64 datagrams per call (0x42768b..0x427745), then pops one. Receiving exactly 64 laps the ring and it reads as empty, so the game depends on a small socket backlog; the switch holds 32 datagrams per socket ($VSOCK_DGRAM_MAX).
• Join (0x4204d5): sends a join request on every pass of a loop that waits up to 1000 ms (timeGetTime) for [0x44fe44] (the server's id, set by the 0x47 handler at 0x4064b3), calling only sendto, FIONREAD and the clock, never a message pump. On timeout: "NOTE! Unable to obtain base offset" (MESSAGES.TXT 100). This is why FIONREAD has to pump the wire.

Headless two-process route (lockstep, one batch per round; a 10-batch round is longer than the join's 1000 ms, which is 5 batches at the default clock, so the reply always lands too late):

• both: 900 batches, Enter, 100, Enter, 100 → main menu;
• server: Down, 30, Enter → "Client slot" list;
• joiner: Down, 20, Down, 30, Enter → "Available net games"; ~400 batches later it lists 'Bombs Ahoy' (15992); Enter joins ("Joined... waiting for server to start");
• server: Enter three times, ~300 batches apart → both in the arena.
• Give the joiner a different --wall-clock-ms than the server, or both draw one node id. Hold keys for exactly one batch: three batches trigger the game's key repeat and one Down moves the menu cursor two items.
• Space does everything Enter does past the title, including the server's three starts and the joiner's pick from "Available net games" — measured 2026-09-22 with every Enter after the second replaced by Space on both sides (BOMB_HOST_SCRIPT/BOMB_GUEST_SCRIPT override the routes), all ten checks green. That is why the phone overlay needs no Enter button: its Bomb button is Space, and Esc skips the publisher logos straight to the menu.
• test/test-atomic-bomberman-vlan-gameplay.js runs exactly this route (~75 s) and checks the announce, join request, join reply and both in-match streams on --trace-net. It SKIPs when the demo is not installed.
• The datagram queue also has a byte bound ($VSOCK_DGRAM_RX_CAP, 64 KB). It was 16 KB, the stream ring size, at first, and that dropped enough of Quake II's ~1400-byte signon burst that test-quake2-vlan-gameplay.js's client never entered the world. Run that test on any change to the queue.