Show HN: Complete decompilation of Lego Island | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Complete decompilation of Lego Island

github.com

251 pointsfoxtacles32 comments

This project goes back to the LEGO Island Rebuilder [1] by (some of?) the same authors, which fixes several bugs in the original game release by patching it in memory (iirc). These fixes include some involved ones, like for the wonky framerate-dependent controls.

MattKC, who developed much of this original work, has a nice Youtube channel full of video postmortems for some of these [2]. It's kind of fun just to watch him poke around with a hex editor, unraveling the arcane mysteries of a long-sunken civilization of Win95 developers.

[1]: https://github.com/isledecomp/LEGOIslandRebuilder

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/@MattKC

I've learned of MattKC through a video of his about how he ported .NET to Windows 95 (mostly).

I love the dedication content like this shows off. In an age of ever decreasing attention spans, it's nice to see someone going through the grunt work for something other than pure financial gain.

MattKC is a good YouTuber in my opinion. His videos are simple, fun and extremely information dense. I haven't had time but I purchased a Wii-U remote at a garage sale because it had all the pieces and was paired together. Days later I see MattKC on stream hacking the Bluetooth!

The tooling and infrastructure in this project are pretty interesting as these things go. It's always cool to see how each decompilation project springs up with different ideas and goals - this one seems very focused on 1:1 accuracy, with a side-project for compatibility / cross-platform reimplementation:

* https://github.com/isledecomp/reccmp is a lint tool which compares compiled function reimplementations with the original binary and produces an automated report detailing the instruction level accuracy of the re-implementation, while dealing with all of the fun of C++.

* https://github.com/isledecomp/SIEdit is a resource editor for the bizarre RIFF-esque resource streaming format the original developer (Mindscape) seems to have invented.

Also while we're on the subject of vintage LEGO games, I've recently been quite into playing Manic Miners, a complete Unreal Engine remake (not decompilation/reimplementation, an actual ground-up recreation!) of Rock Raiders.

I'm hoping someone does Alpha Team next; it was a quite fun puzzle game but incredibly buggy.

I am seeing more reason to re-make in Unreal, Unity, Godot, Blender lately, these softwares are becoming increasingly more beginner friendly and downloading 3D assets and programming 3D skeleton animations are becoming easier

I’m gonna have to get Manic Miners, lots of fond memories playing Rock Raiders with my friends

For those looking for the game, it's on itch.io : https://baraklava.itch.io/manic-miners

I did a few thousand lines of this.

In particular it was interesting learning about D3D retained mode as I did that part. What a weird piece of rendering history.

Worth a search if you haven't heard about it before: D3DRM.

The top search hit for "d3d retained mode" is now https://www.legoisland.org/wiki/Direct3D_Retained_Mode , going full circle.

You can build a mountain, if you do it brick by brick...

Papa told mama and laura told nick...

Thank you to everyone who worked on this. One of my favorite games growing up, I’m glad to know it’ll be around to show my kid.

I love these kind of things, for years I want to learn decompile old games....but equal other things I do not know what it is the first steps or tools.

If you’re interested, I’ve been decompiling Castlevania: Symphony of the Night live Monday through Thursday at 11am pacific time on twitch for several months - https://www.twitch.tv/madeupofwires

I’m happy to talk about the tools and process or anything anyone else in chat wants to know about. I have about 10kloc contributed and worked on tooling and build, but still have a lot to learn myself.

>but equal other things I do not know what it is the first steps or tools.

I watch a lot of these sorts of projects on youtube, my big takeaway is that I probably should learn how to use Ghidra.

I had aspirations to decompile another MSVC 4.2 game (FireFight) and I got stymied on CMake - among other things.

This repo looks like a good reference.

I liked this game when I was a kid but I remember being massively disappointed that there wasn't more building.

My two favorite games for some time were Lego Island and Lego Loco.

Lego Loco is a city builder and railroad builder game. Something like a more basic SimCity and Railroad Tycoon crossover maybe. I really liked Lego Loco because you can build a whole city out of Lego to your own liking.

So I had Lego building in Lego Loco and I had Lego Island with all the fun stories and things you could do there, like chasing Pepper the criminal with a helicopter and using donuts and pizzas to help the police on ground and the skateboarder.

Wow, I've seen anyone mention Lego Loco before! That was a great game. I was horrible at it, but the art style and atmosphere was great.

I loved Lego Loco. You could even set the game as a screensaver, and it would basically play whatever map you were on whenever your screensaver turned on!

I kind of miss screensavers actually

>I kind of miss screensavers actually

Same, I wish they'd update all the older ones to look good on newer screens. I want the crazy pipes and the flying toasters and such again.

Brickster's the criminal, Pepper chased him with a rebuilt police helicoptor lobbing pizzas and donuts to help Nick and Laura on the ground catch Brickster.

Also, second you on LEGO Loco. Of the original trilogy (Creator, Loco, and Chess), Loco by far was the most fun. Kudos to the Chess King though, saying the Knights are BMX bikeriders still hasn't been surpassed.

Lego Loco was cool in there was a network version that let you send your train to other people.

This was a favorite of mine as a kid as well - I remember revisiting it after seeing a YouTube video of someone doing a technical breakdown. I realized that this game had maybe less than half an hour of content! I remember losing hours to this game.

What we didn’t have in content we made up in replayability! So many “Great games” from that era had a sandbox mode or other replayability.

The game looks like Roblox and is just as creepy too: https://youtu.be/xyqXZDyR-RA

Wait, why is Roblox creepy?

It's been called a casino for kids. There's decent reporting around this. I wouldn't let my kid near this, or anything that has a game currency tied to a real-world currency.

Ahh interesting, thank you!

Such a shame it’s like this now because I played it extensively as a kid back in 06 and 07 and it helped inspire me to learn programming.

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28247034

and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014754

Thank you!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com