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Show HN: After a decade of reversing, I got co-op working in DOS Wing Commander

39 points daniel_rh 2 hours ago 4 comments

daniel_rh 2 hours ago | parent

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.

frikk 48 minutes ago | parent

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 30 minutes ago | parent

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.

cadr 33 minutes ago | parent

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!