Every journey comes to an end, and this is the end of a very personal journey that started back in May 2025. A lot has happened since then: I uncovered what breaks the game, how to fix it, bought all available versions of the game I could find (including some quite expensive shipping from Japan to Germany), did some last-minute fixes, and discovered some secrets.

Thanks to the help of my incredibly talented friends from the ScummVM project, and thanks to everyone following me on this adventure over the last couple of months, I finally proudly present: The patch files required to play “Masters of the Elements” on Windows 2000 and higher, up to Windows 11.

Enjoy!

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While working with the game files of Masters of the Elements, I found something exciting hidden in one of the script files: Multiple, undocumented cheat and debug codes.

Well, they were undocumented up until now, so without further ado, but a hefty spoiler warning, let’s see how we can bend the laws of time, train bats, or get infinitely lucky.

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While recently going through the latest commit messages for the incredible PC emulator 86Box in preparation for their release of version 5.0, I stumbled across commit 8944c92 with the following commit message: CD-ROM: Parity and CRC checking support, System Shock 2 now works with a directly mounted .CUE image as well.

My initial thought? “Wow, they just added support for the SafeDisc copy protection, this is awesome! I can play The Sims and Age of Empires 2 now!”.

Well, the games themselves were already compatible with 86Box, but it was the SafeDisc copy protection that rendered the games unusable.

Let me explain.

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In the previous part of this series, we finally fixed the game itself by removing the broken library and replacing it with a more modern alternative.

However, we are not done yet - there are still some minor issues left to fix. Let’s go!

Starting the game is a whole puzzle by itself. Depending on the release, the intro screen, which also serves as the main menu, is broken starting with Windows 2000. This issue significantly hinders the game’s usability, as you’ll either get almost all UI elements (except the one that actually starts the game) or none (unless you know the exact location and hover the mouse over them).

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I briefly talked about Xtras and XObjects in the first part of this series. To recap, Xtras and XObjects are specially crafted libraries that extend Macromedia Director’s functionality by exporting additional functions that can then be used in the Lingo scripts powering the individual application. This allows a deeper integration with the operating system, since the Xtras and XObjects can provide a bridge between Macromedia Director and the operating system’s API.

Masters of the Elements uses such a third-party XObject for controlling the mouse cursor as we discovered in the previous articles.

Now that we know how it breaks the game and what it actually does, it is time to look for a proper replacement.

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For my next small side project, I’m running a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W as a proxy server for my website. In fact, right now, fabulous.system is served from this exact Pi!

For this task, the limited CPU capabilities are not that big of a deal, but the limited RAM is. Sometimes, 512 MB is really not enough memory. Clearly I can’t simply add more RAM to the Pi, so I decided to disable as many hardware features as possible.

I don’t need WiFi, sound or accelerated video; all I need is USB for my Ethernet adapters.

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In Macromedia Director, everything is related to cinematography and theaters. A Director project consists of individual movies, timed and coordinated by the score. The canvas where you place all the objects is the stage; objects and scripts compose the cast, and each object and script is a cast member.

Then, there’s the Projector, the executable file that plays all movies in the defined order. And just like a real movie projector shines light through the film, we have to reverse this process: Splitting the beam of light to reveal the real source.

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Masters of the Elements (or Meister Zufall und die Herrscher der Elemente in Germany) is an educational adventure video game developed by the Dutch studio IJsfontein Interactive Media, initially released in late 1997 for Macintosh and Microsoft Windows.

I don’t remember when I got the game; it was most likely Christmas 1999 or 2000. What I do remember, though, is that I spent many hours wandering around the game and trying to solve the puzzles.

And I remember the day the game would stop working forever: The day I updated my PC to Windows 2000.

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One part of my work for the ScummVM project is helping to keep the server infrastructure up and running, including our primary server, which hosts our website, wiki, forums, and some internal applications.

About three weeks ago, I started receiving monitoring notifications indicating an increased load on the MariaDB server. This in itself is nothing too unusual. It usually means nothing but a sudden influx of new visitors, and in most cases, it is just a link being shared somewhere or a single IP trying to annoy us.

The notifications popped up and disappeared as quickly as they appeared. I started to look into the log files of our web server, and I didn’t notice anything too unusual, maybe a bit more background noise. This went on for a couple of days without seriously impacting our server or accessibility–it was a tad slower than usual.

And then the website went down.

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In June 2022, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer would be phased out. In February 2023, they deactivated it with a Windows 10 updated and encouraged users to switch to their Edge browser.

If you ever tried to start Internet Explorer through iexplore.exe after this date or on a fresh Windows 11 installation, Windows opens the Edge browser instead. If you want to use a web application that only supports Internet Explorer, Microsoft recommends using the compatibility mode in the Edge browser.

But what if I tell you that to this date, Internet Explorer is deeply embedded in Windows 11 and can be used without even having the Edge browser installed?

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