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Comment by type_enthusiast | Hacker News Reader

I grew up here :P

This was such a passtime for me that 20 years later I remember the randomly-generated names of some individual soldiers who came through for me and turned a battle around when there seemed to be no hope.

Siegfried Krause, I applaud your sniper abilities to this day.

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It was also interesting from a design perspective; the various parts of the game were all separate executables and I never did figure out how they all interacted (though clearly some people did, as evidenced by the excellent XComUtil which has proved difficult to track down lately!)

IIRC the game just wrote a plain data file onto disk and the next executable read it up with all the needed info.

Well sure, when you put it that way it sounds simple! I was 12 or so, and I spent a few nights trying to figure out the "plain data file" before shrugging and going back to playing X-Com.

Well, reverse engineering binary data is hard and laborious, and probably incomprehensible to almost any 12-year-old (and the majority of adults).

(I'm assuming they were binary. I really can't remember what they were.)

Gotta be honest, I installed the game tonight under DOSBox thinking I would give thirty-something, seasoned engineer me another crack at decoding the file format. But then, those UFOs kept landing and I mean, somebody had to do something about it. And then all of a sudden my kids were like "daddy where are you" and the file format (and UFOs) once again had to wait for another day...

Huh that explains it! I realised (somehow) that if I ctrl-q (or alt-f4) in a mission, it kicks you out to the Misson finished with the same results as your last completed mission.

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