[JuanDeLaCierva]

BornHack 2020 - Ramón Soto Mathiesen - Hacking on PKF files:

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Código:

Most of you probably have never heard of PFK files right and I think it's only fair to say that most of the people who have played the old-school PC games that use them, have neither.

PFK files are data containers for the PCx (PC Fútbol and PC Basket) games developed by Dynamics Multimedia, a company that emerged from the extinct Dynamic Software, which was known for their 8/16 bits games developed on: Sinclair ZX81, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, MSX, Commodore 64 and later on: Arcade machines and PCs, such as: "Game over", "Hammer Boy", "Mega Phoenix" and "Risky Woods" among others.

Dynamic Software was mainly driven by the three developers, the Ruiz Tejedor brothers: Pablo, Víctor and Nacho. When they created Dynamics Multimedia, their fourth brother Gaby joined. Gaby was a football enthusiast and the four, together with Carlos Abril and Pedro Sudón, were able to create the most successful PC gaming series of all time in Spain's history: PC Fútbol, with more than 1.560.000 magazines (*) sold. This success was not only limited to Spain, as the game was exported to Italy (PC Calcio), Argentina (PC Apertura/Clausura) and UK (PC Premier/Premier Manager 97 and 99).

Two years ago, it was the 25th anniversary of the first edition of the PC Fútbol game and thanks to Wine I was able to install it on my *nix box. I learned that there existed a Community that tried to keep the game up-to-date with the newest players and teams +25 years later. I also noticed that it takes a lot of effort from the Community to do this, as it's mostly a manual process when editing data in (encoded) binary format. Users have stated on PCFutbolMania.com that it takes about a day to update a team. Since the games have around +480 teams, this can be a tedious and time consuming process.

In this talk I will showcase how i have been able to create some tools that will ease data updates of these awesome games in an almost no time and letting the computer do all the work.

(*) - Come by and learn why I state magazines and not units or copies of the game.