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Comment by ggambetta | Hacker News Reader

As every time this comes up, and in the hopes of someone reading HN knows someone who knows someone... I'd love to get my hands on the source code of Dark Sun: Shattered Lands and Dark Sun: Wake of the Ravager (SSI Gold Box RPGs), and to a lesser extent Twilight: 2000 (Paragon Software), and Little Big Adventure / Twinsen's Adventure and Twinsen's Oddysey. I'd love to port them to modern systems and/or remaster the art to the extent that is possible. These are games with incredible gameplay but whose art hasn't aged that well.

Also periodic beg to Splash Damage / whoever owns the rights to the content for Enemy Territory to release them, so they can be modded (not the source, but the maps and models). Again, perfect gameplay, would love to see it with modern 3D capabilities.

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Years ago I really wanted the sauce to AOL's NWN. Gold Box RPG in MMO form! I actually played it online back when AOL was $5/hr (after the first five free hours!).

At some point I talked to someone who worked at the co who ate the co who would've owned the source. IIRC someone went looking for it but it was gone/lost. There've been some recreations but man it'd be great to get the orignial.

The other k-rad 90's MMO I played, Meridian 59, got its sauce dumped relatively recently too. That was a fun read.

For LBA at least, a group of fans reverse engineered the entire engine and made a new one:

https://github.com/xesf/twin-e

Dotemu have also re-released it:

http://www.dotemu.com/game/little-big-adventure/

There's few things I wouldn't give for the source code to the old Westwood games. Particularly Tiberian Sun/Red Alert 2

Word around the internet though is that EA lost the source code to all the pre-Generals (2004) C&C games

You're in luck, my friend. https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA

I can't comment for sure if they still have the source, but I know that EA made changes to those games when they released The First Decade [0] to make their CD-checks accept the new DVD. Most of the games were recompiled (so source was available) for that.

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But the RA2: Yuri's Revenge binary was just patched where needed. This distinction was made because at the time YR already had some hardcore fans decompiling it and enhancing it, EA's community manager heard about this and made sure that community effort was not destroyed. I was one of those fans, and taking it apart was one hell of an adventure. We didn't decompile all of it, but we figured out many details, and added a lot of bugfixes and enhancements. It's not the same thing as the real source code, but you can see what we got in [1]/[2]/[3] (unfortunately those haven't been updated in a while).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer:_The_First...

[1]: https://github.com/Ares-Developers/YRpp

[2]: https://github.com/Ares-Developers/Ares

[3]: https://www.modenc.renegadeprojects.com/Contributing_to_Ares

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