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

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

#61
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dolls / Girls Frontline 2: Exilium[0][1][2] is a modern take on the XCOM concept. Free (but gacha.) 0. https://gf2exilium.sunborngame.com/main 1. https://gf2.haoplay.com/jp/ 2. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3308670/GIRLS_FRONTLINE_2...

> gacha Hard pass.

Spending money is actually entirely optional.

I personally haven't, because it would take the fun out of the game.

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

#62
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?

Spice86 has a pretty good built-in debugger. I found it much easier to work with than DosBox's debugger. Spice86's DOS emulation isn't as good as DosBox's yet, but it's getting better all the time. https://github.com/OpenRakis/Spice86

I second LowLevelMahn's recommendation for IDA 5 Free. It's a good disassembler for DOS applications and helps me navigate what I'm looking at in the Spice86 debugger. It also runs very well in Wine.

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

#63
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gacha Hard pass.

Spending money is actually entirely optional. I personally haven't, because it would take the fun out of the game.

Yeah I know. I lost 2 years to Azur Lane. That was enough.

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

#64
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spending money is actually entirely optional. I personally haven't, because it would take the fun out of the game.

Yeah I know. I lost 2 years to Azur Lane. That was enough.

Love them shipgirls, eh?

Right now, I am caught up with gfl2, and having a blast with Arknights: Endfield. The factory must grow!

In a few weeks, I'll probably be working on my projects and not touching any games at all, as I was just a few weeks ago.

Two years is indeed a bit too much. Got to do something else when it stops being fun. I had to learn that lesson with a few months of DOTA2; it can turn into a job, except that it produces nothing of value.

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

#65
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

"If you owe the bank $100, you have a problem. If you owe the bank 2^32 dollars, the bank has a problem."

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

#66
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?

I'll add another recommendation for the freeware version of IDA 5, a copy of which the ScummVM project has permission to host. Although it's Windows-only and its UI feels a bit clunky today, the keyboard shortcuts allow an experienced user to be pretty efficient in navigating code, assigning data types, changing symbol names, etc.

I was especially pleased with IDA 5's ability to find and organize all the segments in just about any MZ EXE I've used it to reverse. It was even able to deal with the overlay segments in a Borland VROOMM / FBOV executable, and that was a pretty short-lived endeavor that faded to obscurity as soon as DOS/4G was on the scene.

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