Retro Recovery

This challenge takes place in the Retro Emporium. Mark and Kevin were in there working away at some retro computing projects and found an old FAT12 floppy disk. The image of this disk is available for us to download and interact with on our own systems. You can download it by clicking your badge inside of the Holiday Hack Challenge world and navigating to Items. From there the disk image may be downloaded. There isn't much direction in this challenge aside from seeing "what we can find" on the disk. Mark does give us a hint by mentioning a Star Trek game written in BASIC and the fact that recently deleted files may still be hiding on this disk somewhere.

Windows cannot mount this disk natively. Its either corrupted or the FAT12 partition is too old for it to accurately mount it. So the first thing I do in situations like this is to just look at the image in a text editor. The Star Trek basic game is sitting right at the beginning of the disk image. Without using any recovery tools or analyzing anything I'm looking at a base64 encoded string embedded as a comment in the game's source code, line 211!

I entered the flag text "merry christmas to all and to all a good night" into my badge and completed the challenge!

I decided to go ahead run this through a disk recovery tool regardless. I used TestDisk to do the recovery. I ran the utility against the floppy.img file and accepted all the default options.

It did a rebuild of the boot partition, and allowed me to list the files.

The first file in the listing was "all_i-want_for_christmas.bas". Note that it is highlighted in red because it had been marked as deleted. In TestDisk, I copied the file to my local file system with the "c" command. Now I can interact with it on my system, fully extracted.

I loaded up DosBox which can run QBASIC programs. I mounted the directory with the "all_i-want_for_christmas.bas" file and ran it. Playing this game brought back some OLD OLD memories!