Menu.exe from the Twilight DOS has provided some easter eggs such as menu options and DrUnK mode… but there’s still more. After creating a memory-dump of the Twilight executable, we found the following funny easter-egg… you can trigger that by hitting ALT+F5.
From the memory
“ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789`~!@#$%^&*()-=_+|[]{};’:”,./<>? Search Again Use F2/F3 or Shift-F2/F3 to start a search first! Warning You pushed ALT-F5. Don’t do that again. Final Warning Hey, I warned you! Don’t push ALT-F5 again! Really Final Warning OK, one more time and you’re out! ALT-F5 overflow. I warned you… :-) [installed=%d] [err=%d] [%.2x, %.2x] @ù#[-$T#-]@ù `ú ùù -ÄÄÄÄ~Äþ- ~T|wilight ~I|nstaller ~V|2.44 ~-þÄ`ÄÄÄÄ—ù úú @ù#[-$T#-]@ù `[F1]~ Help `[Enter]~ Select `[/]~ Select Drive `[Tab]~ Read Docs `[Esc]~ Quit /C /LOW /? Twilight Installer V2.44 (C) 1996 by Twilight Crew”
This is what happens
Hitting ALT-F5
Hitting ALT-F5 again…
And again…
And we’re finally rewarded for our actions:
Dosbox debug options explained
To dump the memory of DOS applications you can use Dosbox Debug (tutorial). When running as administrator (or a privileged account) you can debug applications using:
DEBUG MENU.EXE
Now the debugger window appears next to the application window. The application will run with F5. After running a binary memory dump can be made with MEMDUMPBIN 1000000. This will dump all Twilight’s menu messages (for all windows and menu options) in a textfile in the dosbox folder. The file is called memdump.bin and will open with a text editor.
For example:
Menu.exe contains many many many status messages, but most of them are functional and can be reached using the menu’s option.
Menu.exe was built with Borland C++ – Copyright 1991 Borland Intl. References to S3 Trio64, IBM and Compaq are also in the dump, most likely from the debugger itself.
