Slave Zero (demo)

Accolade/Ronin Entertainment, 1999, third-person mech shooter, Direct3D. Registered as slave_zero_demo (candidate slave-zero-demo, local only).

Source and layout

• archive.org SlaveZeroDemo, SlaveZeroDemo.zip (sha1 881fdbf2d7e239e7986be34f8fbc1e19199e1326). The readme says the demo "may not be copied, distributed, transferred or sold", so it is a local ignored fixture only.
• The zip is an InstallShield 5 Setup tree. File group DEFAULT of data1.cab is the whole game; the manifest unshields it into installed/Slave Zero/ and copies InstData/GameData/INSTSUPP/szHardware.ini beside the exe (the installer writes it there; without it the renderer probe has no hardware table). No installer run needed.
• Run SlaveZero.exe with the working directory C:\Slave Zero (exeGuestPath c:\slave zero\slavezero.exe). It LoadLibrary's d3d.dll, wgamescript.dll, winputkbm.dll, wdsound.dll and a3dapi.dll from its own folder.

Runtime requirements found

• Real msvcrt. The app declares dlls: ['binaries/dlls/msvcrt.dll']. With the built-in WAT CRT it stopped at _putenv (now implemented, 51ef79adc) and then _strdate; the real DLL avoids that whole tail. The CLI finds test/binaries/dlls on its own, so the CLI never showed it.
• ~15000 live DirectDraw surfaces in the demo level (tiny textures plus their mip levels). It exhausted the 8192 DX object slots and then the 63 MB DIB arena (whole 4K pages per surface). Fixed in c758a6742: $DX_MAX 16384 and heap storage for plain textures and mip levels when the arena is full.
• A3D. a3dapi.dll CoCreateInstance's the A3D class whose server a3d.dll is not shipped. CoCreateInstance fails with REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG and the game continues with DirectSound. In the browser the guest-main Worker's failure path left EIP on the CoCreateInstance thunk (it only set EAX and popped ESP), so the thunk re-ran on the caller's stack and the guest trapped unreachable at a heap EIP. The CLI had this fixed for Pirates!; both now share DllLoader.failComDllYield.
• "AudBuffer error in lock" (wdsound.dll): an intermittent modal box. The music stream thread locks a buffer that has already been released. Known, not yet root-caused.

Headless route

node test/run.js --app=slave_zero_demo --quiet-api --max-batches=2600 --batch-size=200000 reaches the front-end menu. In 640x480, NEW GAME is at (320,153).