Being interested in preservation of old DOS games, I've grown to give a lot of value to authentic date stamps on files. You see, there are two primary issues with this:
a) vanilla DOSBox does not preserve date stamps when copying files, so if you run any DOS-based installer within DOSBox, the files that it creates will have their modified date the same as their created date as the, i.e. it will be set to the date and time when the installer created these files. However, this is not true for DOSBox SVN Daum or DOSBox-X, which do preserve original modified dates in most cases (depending on the installer type)
b) various host file systems and archivers may modify the time stamp according to the user's current time zone.
With this in mind, when I say that the date stamps are authentic, I mean that they have not been altered by the above processes, or by any other similar process. I do not in any way imply that files without authentic date stamps have been modified or tampered with -- I only point out that the date stamps have been altered, and nothing else.
So, for example, if you take the downloadable Daggerfall demo which was originally available from Bethesda FTP (DAGDEMO.ZIP), you can say that the date stamps on the files inside are "authentic", inasmuch that they are the same as when the ZIP archive was packed on a Bethesda PC back in 1996.
Now onto the discussion, I hope to clarify any questions that my previous post might have raised:
As I mentioned above, the date stamps reflecting the time when the files were installed on the user's machine are simply an artifact of vanilla DOSBox, or in your case perhaps the way how Steam works. But this was not so under real DOS, and DOSBox-X or DOSBox SVN Daum replicate the correct behaviour. For example, I've just installed a fresh Minimum install from the Bethesda freeware version using DOSBox SVN Daum:Interkarma wrote: ↑Sun Mar 26, 2023 10:58 pm I reinstalled Daggerfall from Steam the other day and my datestamps are 11 April 2023. Are those files not authentic? The initial datestamp is meaningless, it's simply the date files were first installed to filesystem.
The correct date stamps have been preserved, i.e. they are the same as on the Daggerfall CD.
Again, I never argued that altered date stamps necessarily mean that a file has been modified. I'm only pointing out that there are original date stamps as set on the Daggerfall CD files, which would normally carry over to the installation on the user's HDD, if it weren't for vanilla DOSBox' inability to preserve date stamps.Interkarma wrote: ↑Sun Mar 26, 2023 10:58 pm You can't determine if a file is unmodified just by looking at dates.
However, this is only where things begin to get interesting.
You see, comparing the Daggerfall CD, the FTP demo I mentioned above and the CD-exclusive Betony demo, one can conclude that the date stamps on the retail CD release are not the original file modify dates, but likely the dates when the CD was being mastered. In fact, most files in the freeware version are dated 1996-09-05 21:00:02, whereas if you look at the contents of DAGDEMO.ZIP ARENA2 folder, some files date back to 1993 (while being identical to their retail CD counterparts). Note that both the FTP demo and the Betony demo have been released after the retail release 1.0, and are based on two different patched versions of the full game. Also, the date stamps on data files between both demo versions are identical.
One can infer some interesting things from this.
For example, we all know that paperdoll clothes (TEXTURE.235-TEXTURE.242) are a mess. It appears that originally, all races' body shapes were supposed to be identical like in Arena, save for the tails of Argonian and Khajit characters. As new body shapes were introduced, in particular for humans and elves, so changes were made to the clothes, in the case of females exceptionally hastily. Here are the date stamps for these files in the FTP demo:
Code: Select all
TEXTURE 235 390,514 24-09-1995 18:43 female Argonian
TEXTURE 236 390,510 24-09-1995 18:43 female Elf
TEXTURE 237 389,574 20-05-1996 10:56 female Human
TEXTURE 238 390,470 24-09-1995 18:45 female Khajit
TEXTURE 239 370,231 24-09-1995 18:47 male Argonian
TEXTURE 240 370,010 24-09-1995 18:47 male Elf
TEXTURE 241 377,891 20-05-1996 10:48 male Human
TEXTURE 242 367,909 21-05-1996 21:18 male Khajit