I think we will see more and more games and applications be fully reversed engineered in the coming month due to increase coding agent capabilities.
Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)
21–30 of 54 posts
Re: Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)
#22This is my all time favorite DOS game. It felt open world before people used that phrase. Amazing game.
Re: Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)
#23Author here. I’m happy to see one of my projects on Hacker News. This has been a fun one. One evening you just try to disassemble it and wonder where the code is. The following months were a truly satisfying experience, reverse-engineering this diamond. There is still a functioning Forth interpreter implemented in the game. If they hadn’t removed all the word names, it would have been possible to debug at any time an…
Some early source code snippets of the game have even survived and can still be found on archive.org [0]. By today’s standards, they’re almost unreadable. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20030906124225/http://www.sonic....
"By today's standards"? no that's just FORTH code
Re: Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)
#24Early in the 2000's one of the original authors of Sfarflight posted a massive dump of information online: design documents and source code. That is the "Technical Articles Saved from Oblivion" link in this repository. Sadly no one seems to have managed to save a full copy! This is one I kick myself about: I browsed this back when it was up but didnt think to download. These days I make a point to request Internet Archives to save things like this if I ever come across it.
Re: Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)
#25Starflight is the great grandfather of No Man’s Sky, and the first game I availed myself of using Internet databases to find obscure facts about the game. There was no website. It was some group of people curating a text document that was reposted to Usenet periodically with additions and corrections.
I don’t know when I started the game, but I finished it the summer after my freshman year, which is where I first got Internet access.
Re: Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)
#26Early in the 2000's one of the original authors of Sfarflight posted a massive dump of information online: design documents and source code. That is the "Technical Articles Saved from Oblivion" link in this repository. Sadly no one seems to have managed to save a full copy! This is one I kick myself about: I browsed this back when it was up but didnt think to download. These days I make a point to request Internet Ar…
I'm not sure what you're referring to since the files T.C. Lee posted on that geocities site are the only design documents he (or anyone else) ever released, and those are preserved in the SFFiles.zip found at the oocities mirror linked from the github there. That zip contained only a partial dump of some source code, while that sonic.net page contains a more complete copy (but lacks any kind of design documents whatsoever). Was there something else you were referring to?
Re: Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)
#27You can read more about this gem of a game upon the digital antiquarian:
Re: Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone goes on about Elite, but Elite was just a sandbox… (an amazing sandbox) This was crazy! World gen is hard. Proc world gen is NP hard. Story driven proc world gen with persistence in 1986 was Kaku level brilliance.
I loved Starlight but I'm not sure it was procedural world generation. I mean there was a map of stars printed with the game so they weren't changing. There was a small bit of variation in terms of what one found on planets and so on...the key was it felt like an open world because it was big enough and there was nothing stopping you from doing what you liked and when (except resources).
They bragged about it being procedural in interviews.
What I was never clear on was the degree of cherry picking they did. There were 800 worlds on something like nine disks, each unique and peppered with minerals and artifacts.
Re: Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)
#29> Back in the 80ths, an unknown company called Binary Systems published the game Starflight.
80s - 80ths is a fraction (1/80).
Also - the publisher was Electronic Arts, already well-established at that point. Binary Systems were the developers.
Re: Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)
#30...Forth? Wow. I wonder how much code change was necessary between the various systems. It's hard to imagine a Megadrive Forth compiler, but then again, the game was on several other M68k systems so maybe it wasn't as hard...
It's.. not a compiler (besides I had Forth on my C64). Maybe one can call it a translator to ad-hoc bytecode. I also had USCD Pascal on that C64 which translated to bytecode. This was more JVM-like. So nothing hard about it.
Point of information: By and large FORTHs did not use bytecode. Execution tokens (XTs) were usually stored as a function of the default word size, which typically was 16 bits. There were some FORTHs that went out of their way to use token threading so they could store programs in byte codes, but those were pretty rare. Rarer still were programs that mixed byte code with word-sized code (although one such scheme is described in an issue of Forth Dimensions).