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Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990

vogons.org

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Re: Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990

#41

Post by dijit »

saidnooneever wrote: post #33
jrs235 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never found the bug in that direction. I discovered it the opposite way: when starting out, selling shares (or was it taking loans?) all the shares you can. Get around 30+ million in the hole and continue to lose money. Eventually an arithmetic overflow will occur and then suddenly you'll have a net worth of like $30-40 million and have the money form selling stock to build to your heart's content.

hahah this was it! make so many debt ur suddenly rich haha. kinda like evil corpos do today no? hahahha

"Too big to fail"... ironically a very realistic feature.

Re: Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990

#43

Post by trollbridge »

butz wrote: post #42

Could someone refer to any good entry level DOS games reverse engineering materials? I dabbled a bit with NES hacking, but I'm finding it hard to get into DOS reverse engineering. What debugger to use? Any gotchas I should know in advance?

LLMs are actually great for reverse engineering small chunks of code now.

Re: Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990

#44

Post by ksherlock »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #10

I loved this game so much. There was a "deluxe" version with small improvements. I would love to play a modern version of this. Probably true for other strategy classics like Master of Magic, Master of Orion 2, Colonization. Edit: ha, I remember that I used a really good tactic of playing with competitors' stocks, gaining majority, siphoning tons of money from them, and then selling the stocks. More profitable than r…

Civilization 4 (currently on sale for $6 at gog) includes a colonization mode. I don't like it as much as the original but that's probably my nostalgia bias

Re: Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990

#45

Post by LowLevelMahn »

butz wrote: post #42

Could someone refer to any good entry level DOS games reverse engineering materials? I dabbled a bit with NES hacking, but I'm finding it hard to get into DOS reverse engineering. What debugger to use? Any gotchas I should know in advance?

Tools: IDA Pro 5 (Freeware) is the last Freeware version able to handle DOS executeables (official available by the ScummVM devs https://www.scummvm.org/news/20180331/) - IDA Pro still supports DOS-stuff with latest release - but not the freeware

or Ghidra - but the DOS/16bit support is sometimes lacky - but the decompiler is builtin

here is a list of articles to read: https://forum.stunts.hu/index.php?topic=4287.0

Re: Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990

#46

Post by LowLevelMahn »

nprateem wrote: post #37
LowLevelMahn wrote: post #2

the developer 'Wilczek' is posting the progress on his Railroad Tycoon reversing in this Vogons-Thread

This is such a shit AI comment, what's it even for? Trying to create some lame puppet accounts?

that is the inital post to explain what the link referes to...

Re: Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990

#47

Post by lionkor »

suprjami wrote: post #21
shevy-java wrote: post #9

It was a pretty cool game. Not as good as e. g. civilisation but nonetheless fun. I even managed to make profits with my railroads. Young folks can use dosbox etc... but it just does not feel the same compared to how it was "originally". I could not get myself to want to play raildroad tycoon again; I found it easy to play games such as civilization or UFO: Enemy Unknown (oddly enough the first part is more playable…

OpenXcom adds a whole heap of wonderful conveniences to UFO/X-Com. It's probably my favourite open source game engine clone thing. https://openxcom.org/

> my favourite open source game engine clone thing

For me that's OpenMW

https://openmw.org/

Re: Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990

#48

Post by boring-human »

jaggederest wrote: post #5
marticode wrote: post #3

I spent countless hours as a teen on that game. I feel it might be faster to rewrite it from scratch though than reverse engineer it.

It's trickier than you think! Even for the modern era, the railroad tycoon games are surprisingly deep and sophisticated economic simulations. I still haven't found one to equal Railroad Tycoon 3, which has this kind of neat reactive diffusion field pricing engine. The modern equivalents (I'm thinking of Transport Fever 2) while they are fun games just lacks the ability to build and manipulate a real economy by doing…

> I still haven't found one to equal Railroad Tycoon 3, which has this kind of neat reactive diffusion field pricing engine.

My feelings exactly. I still play it regularly for this reason alone. A really amazing game under the hood.

The Rhodes Unfinished scenario is probably my favorite. On the highest-difficulty level, it starts out as a hard map, then becomes an insatiable resource grab. By the end you're building vanity suspension bridges over chasms and digging tunnels the width of Kilimanjaro.

Re: Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990

#49

Post by [deleted] »

trollbridge wrote: post #43
butz wrote: post #42

Could someone refer to any good entry level DOS games reverse engineering materials? I dabbled a bit with NES hacking, but I'm finding it hard to get into DOS reverse engineering. What debugger to use? Any gotchas I should know in advance?

LLMs are actually great for reverse engineering small chunks of code now.

[deleted]

Re: Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990

#50

Post by zabzonk »

butz wrote: post #42

Could someone refer to any good entry level DOS games reverse engineering materials? I dabbled a bit with NES hacking, but I'm finding it hard to get into DOS reverse engineering. What debugger to use? Any gotchas I should know in advance?

Borland's debugger (came with Borland C++) was very good, if you can get hold of it. I removed copy protection from several games I owned using it, and actually fixed mouse support for another game.
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