Meridian Drift#

Wavelength Interactive, PC, 2004 — publisher folded before release

What’s known going in#

• announced 2002, previewed at two trade shows
• publisher, Wavelength Interactive, ceased trading in late 2004
• no retail release ever shipped
• a “final beta” build has circulated on abandonware forums since 2009

Everything past this slide comes from that beta build — nothing else survives.

Opening the build#

• installer runs under DOSBox with no compatibility flags
• most assets sit inside a single .mdpak archive
• .mdpak has never been publicly documented

This is week 3’s exercise, applied for real.

Reading .mdpak cold#

4D 44 50 4B  01 00 00 00  8F 03 00 00
M  D  P  K   ─ version ─  ─ file count ─

• MDPK magic bytes confirm the format before anything else
• a 4-byte version field, then a 4-byte file count
• a file table follows: name, offset, length — repeated per entry

Twenty minutes with a hex editor and this format gives up its structure.

What the build contains#

• 91 of an estimated 140+ level files
• full audio, apparently complete
• a save-file format (next week’s case study)
• no configuration or launcher — assembled from the archive alone

What ran, and what didn’t#

• first three levels boot and play cleanly
• level nine crashes on load — a missing dependency, not a corrupt file
• final act referenced in dialogue files, but no matching level data exists

Turning this into evidence#

• every claim above traces to a specific file, offset, or forum post
• “91 of 140+” is itself a claim — it needs its own citation
• the missing final act is a finding, not a gap in the write-up

This is the shape every recovery report in this course follows.