Category: Retro

Microsoft Creative Writer – update #1

A probably unachievable project: recovering some UX assets from a Microsoft Kids software that I was (and still am) obsessed with: Creative Writer.

I’ve recently found out that a few years ago Microsoft released the source code of 3D Movie Maker and I started peeking around. There’s still a very active 3DMM community and they reverse-engineered a lot of stuff, and I was wondering if maybe this could help me in recovering those assets. I thought they may be sharing the same engine since the first version of Creative Writer I’d like to work on was released in 1994 and 3DMM followed in 1995 (but development started in 1993).

The software is super tiny, it came on 4 floppies and it takes up 8MB installed on disk, just a bunch of files… like 8 files. The assets (like icons, backgrounds, UX objects) must be in those files. I opened one of them in an hex editor:

I can literally see the content in this .chk “chunky” file, it’s there, I can see the .PICT too. What now?

On 3dmm.com I found a little tool called Chunk Extractor. My original idea was to use an old operating system to do all of this (Windows 98 SE) but all these tools require a more modern operating system (I also tried on XP but still a no). I run it on Windows 10 but unfortunately the file has a slightly different format from the one used in 3DMM and the software complains and throws an error.

I tried another tool, pymaginopolis, a collection of tools for reverse engineering 3DMM. The README states that it can disassemble Creative Writer 2 chunks too so I tried.

To setup the environment clone the repo and run this:

python -m pip install setuptools

then from the repo root dir:

python -m pip install -e .

The repo was last updated in 2021 and I needed to fix a couple of things to make it work on my workstation with Windows 10 and Python 3.14.4 — lazy me, I didn’t want to get up and go get my Thinkpad… don’t judge me.

In the util.py file I updated a couple of lines:

import importlib.metadata as pkg_resources
version_number = pkg_resources.version("pymaginopolis")

and run the script:

py -m pymaginopolis.tools.disassembler "C:\Users\compuk\Desktop\MSKIDS\SHARED\STUFF\WORKSHOP.CHK"

but nope, the file format is definitely different:

File "C:\Users\compuk\Desktop\pymaginopolis-master\pymaginopolis\chunkyfile\loader.py", line 25, in parse_file_header
    raise FileParseException("Bad file header magic: expected CHN2, got %s", file_magic)
pymaginopolis.chunkyfile.common.FileParseException: ('Bad file header magic: expected CHN2, got %s', b'CHNK')

I need to dig a bit deeper here. I have absolutely no idea about any of this. I’m figuring it out as I go, I know nothing about programming. I’ll keep posting updates if I manage to make any progress.

Cannot read photos taken with Mavica, apparently corrupted

Shout-out to the people having this problem (including the future me), here’s the situation: you take pictures using a Sony Mavica (I use an FD75), you can view them in-camera, but when you try to download them to a PC they show up as corrupted.

I thought it was a Windows 10 problem, I tried with XP to no avail, same with macOS and OpenSUSE. There was no way I could open the files but using Linux I was able to see these:

It looked like something related to bad formatting or something similar, so I dumped the floppy using dd and ran a dosfsck. It tried to fix most of the errors: long file names, sparse files, truncating things… honestly, I don’t really know.

Once the image was fixed, I dumped it onto another floppy, inserted it into the camera and—well, the pictures were there… but I still couldn’t load them on any computer, so the image was probably still trash.

The Mavica has a copydisk function that copies a floppy; apparently, it has enough space to hold the entire disk in memory and then write it onto another one. But… I found out it does a raw copy, so I was just cloning trash again.

The solution was to select the photos one by one and use Mavica’s copy function, which works similarly to copydisk but copies individual files onto another floppy instead of the whole (corrupted) disk. Finally, the photos were accessible from every computer.

Notes on formatting: formatting a floppy with Windows doesn’t cause any weird behavior with disk geometry. The floppy I was having issues with was formatted in msdos using a Mac. Of course, you can also format directly in-camera (which is probably the best option at this point). After the recovery, I also tried reformatting it using OpenSUSE, which made things even worse—the floppy became completely unreadable, to the point where Dolphin kept crashing. I had to reformat it in-camera, which took a bit, but worked like a charm.

VMTools on Windows 2000

To be able to install VMWare Tools on a Windows 2000 machine you also need to install this KB:

If you experience further issues with drivers installation (“Driver installation program does not install device drivers”), you should also install this one:

This KB will work only if you’re using the ENG version. If your Windows is localized, good luck finding the proper one…