A few days ago I shared decoding Midwinter (1989) straight from its binary, and a lot of people fairly asked whether it was a one-off. So I wanted to test the method on something completely different and see if it held up.

I picked Pool of Radiance (1988) — the SSI Gold Box AD&D RPG. Different engine, clean room (no answers carried over, only the method). It worked: cracked the container + compression codec, decoded the sprites, the 29 dungeon maps, the character/item data, and the ECL content bytecode (a 41-opcode VM + a 6-bit text codec), and got it running as a playable rebuild. The heavy decode happened to run while I was out, so most of it came together over one round of golf.

I've open-sourced the whole method as a kit, in case it's useful to anyone: → [https://github.com/DrEvil-TitaniumHelix/dos-decode-kit](https://github.com/DrEvil-TitaniumHelix/dos-decode-kit)  (method + tools, MIT — bring your own legally-obtained game files; no copyrighted game data is shipped)

Full walkthrough (\~6 min): [https://youtu.be/O4P510\_5rqs](https://youtu.be/O4P510_5rqs)

One honest caveat: the hardest cracks were done by Fable 5, which is now decommissioned. Opus 4.8 carried most of the load and is still around, so I'm genuinely curious how much of this reproduces on Opus alone. I'm planning to try it next on Curse of the Azure Bonds and find out.

Happy to talk through the workflow if anyone's interested — it was all done in Claude Code, and when Opus 4.8 hit a wall on the hardest cracks I switched over to Fable 5 by hand, then switched back. No fancy automation — just me escalating models when I got stuck.

Exhibit A (the Midwinter decode): [https://github.com/DrEvil-TitaniumHelix/midwinter-decode](https://github.com/DrEvil-TitaniumHelix/midwinter-decode)

Follow-up to my Midwinter decode: I tried the same method on a second 1988 game (Pool of Radiance) — decoded it from the binary and got it running again. Open-sourcing the kit.