Show HN: After a decade of reversing, I got co-op working in DOS Wing Commander
100 points by daniel_rh 6 hours ago | 11 comments
JeppyG 2 hours ago
Incredible. Honestly tweaking old games is one of my favorite things to do with AI. I've been having a huge go at Captain Claw, one of my favorite games from childhood. Thanks for sharing this. :)
replyAmazingEveryDay 2 hours ago
It's just hard to trust Go again after the multipath tcp debacle.
replydaniel_rh 2 hours ago
I can port https://github.com/danielrh/lobbylink to rust if that's helpful.... probably would have the same external interface.
reply
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.
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.