Time to take a deeper dive into the AppData directory of Map Detectives.
This is where the bulk of the game lives.
The .DXT and .CXT files are compressed/exported Shockwave Director and Cast files.
There are some projects out there dedicated to reverse-engineering and documenting the Shockwave file formats.
They're far enough along that you can export some of the graphics and bytecode from the game, but after playing around with them briefly it looks like modifying and repacking them is not yet possible.
So no Map Detectives mods yet :-(
From the file names it appears as though the game is laid out in a fairly modular fashion, with one Director file per major segment: menu, teacher options, underground map, arrest scene, etc.
One of the problems I encountered running Map Detectives: Urban Mystery on Windows 10 was that the game changed the screen resolution to 640×480 and did not restore it upon exiting.
My laptop's natural resolution is 3240×2160 with 200% scaling, so having all my windows and icons rearranged to fit such a small screen size was very annoying.
There are no display options within the game and the sherston.ini file located next to the game executable had no effect when edited.
All is not lost, however — with a few small edits to the game's executable files these problems can be solved.
"Map Detectives: Urban Mystery" was an educational game released by Sherston Software.
It consists of two puzzle minigames based around an Ordnance Survey town map and the London Underground.
Successfully navigating both maps will reveal clues that can be used to solve the mystery posed at the start of the game.
I'm uncertain of the exact release date; some websites claim the system requirements are Windows 3.1 with an 80486 processor and a 2x CD-ROM drive.
However it was clearly re-released since the version I have access to has executables that couldn't have been created before 2003.
There's very little on the web about this game, so this post attempts to give an overview of the gameplay and mechanics of TMD:UM.
