The game is Worms 2.
Thanks - I wish this trend of burying every detail behind an abstract low information headline would end.
Hacking a 25 Year Old Game to Make It Work [video]
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Re: Hacking a 25 Year Old Game to Make It Work [video]
#12Re: Hacking a 25 Year Old Game to Make It Work [video]
#13Reminds me of the unsung hero who was selflessly patching and fixing AOE2 for many many years before the AOE2 HD stuff on steam. These people are awesome.
Re: Hacking a 25 Year Old Game to Make It Work [video]
#14Looks like the main blocking problem was that the game was stuck in a loop looking for a multimedia system DLL that was missing, because it assumed there would always be a CDROM available. OP lucked out that the code that called winmm.dll had a GitHub link and he could just patch it.
Too bad Microsoft has kind of softened and lost its reputation for Windows's impeccable backward compatibility. This seems like it could have been easily avoided on the OS side.
I'm currently trying to get Distant Worlds: Universe (which is less than half as old as Worms 2, no excuse Microsoft!) working on Windows 11. Same problem: No start, no error message. I'll try some of the tools and techniques highlighted in the video!
Re: Hacking a 25 Year Old Game to Make It Work [video]
#15Looks like the main blocking problem was that the game was stuck in a loop looking for a multimedia system DLL that was missing, because it assumed there would always be a CDROM available. OP lucked out that the code that called winmm.dll had a GitHub link and he could just patch it. Too bad Microsoft has kind of softened and lost its reputation for Windows's impeccable backward compatibility. This seems like it coul…
It's always been a slow rot. Even in the XP days you'd run into issues. I remember Alpha Centauri did NOT like my dual core Athlon and it wasn't even a decade old at the time.
Re: Hacking a 25 Year Old Game to Make It Work [video]
#16[flagged]
Re: Hacking a 25 Year Old Game to Make It Work [video]
#17Very cool.
I wonder if this kind of work is something that LLMs will be good at someday. (Has anyone trained an LLM on machine code yet?) Is it reasonable to hope that 20 years from now you'll be able to say "Hey CodeGPT, this binary doesn't run on Windows 17, can you make a patch?" The deep understanding and creative thinking that Nathan Baggs demonstrates here seems far beyond the capabilities of any tool I'm aware of; on the other hand, even a relatively dumb AI supplemented by brute force might be good enough.
Re: Hacking a 25 Year Old Game to Make It Work [video]
#18I didn't follow too closely when watching the video, so pardon me if it's already answered in the video: did he end up hijacking a different button for opening multi-player dialog? I assume there is no way to recover the removed multi-play button since the sprite (?) was already removed? Also I'm surprised not only they removed the multiplayer button, they even centered the remaining one.
I could be misremembering since I watched the video on its initial release day. I believe the sprite asset was still there and he was able to restore the original button.
Correct
Re: Hacking a 25 Year Old Game to Make It Work [video]
#19Very cool. I wonder if this kind of work is something that LLMs will be good at someday. (Has anyone trained an LLM on machine code yet?) Is it reasonable to hope that 20 years from now you'll be able to say "Hey CodeGPT, this binary doesn't run on Windows 17, can you make a patch?" The deep understanding and creative thinking that Nathan Baggs demonstrates here seems far beyond the capabilities of any tool I'm aware…
You need to be able to explain the goal sufficiently well, and then you need something goal-seeky to do the work, i.e. a closed-loop system.
LLMs are impersonators. They take a prompt and then make up something that relates to the prompt based on their corpus - they are open-loop systems in that sense.
Re: Hacking a 25 Year Old Game to Make It Work [video]
#20Looks like the main blocking problem was that the game was stuck in a loop looking for a multimedia system DLL that was missing, because it assumed there would always be a CDROM available. OP lucked out that the code that called winmm.dll had a GitHub link and he could just patch it. Too bad Microsoft has kind of softened and lost its reputation for Windows's impeccable backward compatibility. This seems like it coul…
If this was a web service, the popular solution would be Docker!
But the joke might make more sense than it appears. Just like a server that was coded to work on a given version of Red Hat or Debian, wouldn't be expected to run without changes on modern versions 10 years later, I guess we shouldn't expect old games to run without a VM that replicates the system they were written to run on.