Show HN: Reversing Wing Commander to find the entity table in 64k to add co-op

I've always wanted to play Wing Commander with friends, so we could fly the story missions together. In 2015, I hypothesized that the full game state fit in the data segment (only 64k), and I could do small position and orientation experiments with vbindiff to discover how the memory was organized. Some fun findings: the camera was in entity index 0x3D (a "3D" joke?). My brother, Patrick, figured out Borland's overlay loader crashed the game until we made our stub look like a real stack frame. To play you need your own copy (e.g. the GOG version) and you drag setup.exe into the browser. It's a DOSBox mod: no game files are hosted. We reversed the game by hand, but LLMs were used for the recent browser/peer-to-peer WebRTC with voice chat port recently, and we continue to use them for ongoing work.

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

4 points daniel_rh 13 days ago 5 comments

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