File date/time stamps in various Daggerfall releases

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MrFlibble
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File date/time stamps in various Daggerfall releases

Post by MrFlibble »

I brought up the topic of different date stamps in another topic, but I'm afraid that I've not expressed myself clearly enough which resulted in a possible misunderstanding.

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:
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.
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:
Image
The correct date stamps have been preserved, i.e. they are the same as on the Daggerfall CD.
Interkarma wrote: Sun Mar 26, 2023 10:58 pm You can't determine if a file is unmodified just by looking at dates.
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.

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
You can see that most files, with the exception of male and female Humans and male Khajit, date back to 24 Sep 1995. In fact, the same files with the same dat stamps can be found in the early demo from the Bethesda CD Sampler. Interestingly, the male Khajit clothes set was the latest to receive updates, which I believe is the addition of the Khajit suit unique to this race (otherwise it's mostly identical to the Argonian set).

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Interkarma
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Re: File date/time stamps in various Daggerfall releases

Post by Interkarma »

I can see you're very interested in this as a DOS game historian. Something you should definitely add to your arsenal is comparing hashes of files rather than relying on dates.

There are many ways you can do this. In Windows Powershell, the "Get-FileHash" command is very good. You can even drag-and-drop files into the executing command to get hashes.

For example, the following two files have different date stamps and were installed by different processes, but their hashes are identical because they're the same file.

hashes.png
hashes.png (61.15 KiB) Viewed 2882 times

In this way, you can compare the hash of something you know (e.g. a file under your control) vs. the hash of something you don't know (e.g. a file sourced elsewhere). Then you can know if the files are identical or not without depending on dates, which are meaningless as I said in previous post.

I hope that is of some help. :) I'm not sure if I can contribute much else to conversation, as I don't have the same interest or knowledge in this subject as yourself.

Lywzc
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Joined: Mon Sep 23, 2019 6:15 pm

Re: File date/time stamps in various Daggerfall releases

Post by Lywzc »

Well, the original date is useful to determine which file is latter added or changed, something you can not know using content comparison, unless the timestamp is in the file itself as a comment or something. And that itself can give considerable amount of insight on how the game is developed, what are last minute additions and others.

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MrFlibble
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Re: File date/time stamps in various Daggerfall releases

Post by MrFlibble »

Interkarma wrote: Thu Apr 13, 2023 9:45 am I can see you're very interested in this as a DOS game historian. Something you should definitely add to your arsenal is comparing hashes of files rather than relying on dates.
Nice, thanks!!! I've not really used hashes before, I'll need to look into this :)

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