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points by daniel_rh 3 days ago | 0 comments
Author here: in 2015, I was playing the classic Wing Commander in DOSBox and suddenly realized the game state fit in the 64k data segment.

Over ten years my brother and I went through a set of experiments (stop and go, turn, communicate) while probing the memory. We uncovered where the variables were, how to inject calls into the game functions, and how to sync the gamestate across the network, so we can fly the story missions together.

My favorite finding is that the camera lives in entity slot 0x3D, which is possibly a "3D" reference by the original developers.

You can play it at https://fireflyk64.github.io/dosbox in browser. If you own Wing Commander, drag in the installer since no game files are hosted. If you don't, the page will load the original DOS/3Dfx version of Vega Strike, before I open sourced it. I upscaled and redid DOS Vega Strike art using AI, but it now has multiplayer and a similar feel.

I'll be in the lobby for the next few hours if anyone wants to fly together.

Disclosure: I also used AI for the final step to help compile for the browser and port our TCP networking stack to WebRTC with voice and solve a few lingering bugs.

[–] cadr 3 days ago
I don't know if I'm more impressed with the result, or that you kept coming back to it for a decade. Super cool!
[–] spiritplumber 2 days ago
HI DANIEL YOU'RE AWESOME <3 <3 <3

guess what me and kuprin who met on the privateer remake forum are a couple, and i got citizenship <3

miss you!

[–] n0th3rwcf4n2026 1 day ago
Hey spiritplumber, that's a nick I have not seen in many years! Are you still working on any of the old models from back during the vegastrike era? I remember you prolificly produced a ton of wing commander models, I think at least some had gotten used in other projects, but then vegastrike 0.5 changed a bunch of formatting?

Anyways just wanted to say I appreciated all the work you did and thought it was cool to randomly run across you here!

[–] spiritplumber 13 hours ago
hi! did you see the new priv remake? (i wasn't in it) they saw WCU and basically ran with it

what i DID do is a bunch of accurate wing commander 1 and privateer ships for Space Engineers, just yoink them on the steam workshop :)

[–] frikk 3 days ago
helllllll yeah. i think it's awesome when domain experts and clever humans use AI to automate the implementation after they've designed the path through the forest. Nice work.
[–] daniel_rh 3 days ago
I definitely used AI to bring my old Vega Strike DOS game up to speed and make it work with the layout. Some of the art is better than the rest, but it did feel good to dust off the old dos game from the geocities era and write an equivalent "accelerator" in DOSBox, so that we could get 640x480 graphics in dos. The new Vega Strike is still being developed at https://www.vega-strike.org/

However, that original WC-only 8+ years of figuring out how the data segment was organized and how to call original functions was all by-hand hacking. It was indeed like cutting through a dark forest with no guide.

[–] genxy 3 days ago
You write well.
[–] atakmim 2 days ago
If you start today with AI assistance, how long will it take?
[–] daniel_rh 1 day ago
0 minutes because the entire 11 years this project has been open source on a dosbox branch; therefore, it has all been harvested in the training set, and it's a matter of requesting that the model reproduce the training set and replicate my and others' memory debugging adventures.
[–] atakmim 1 day ago
Reading my comment again, I realize it sounded not okay and even rude, sorry about that! I didn't want to say AI can just replace 8+ years of hard work and probing memory by hand. I'm curious what parts of the reverse engineering process can be faster with modern AI tools today? What parts still need 100% human logic and trial and error. Amazing job for not giving up on this for so long!