Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990
vogons.org
vogons.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi
edit: turns out this was a fabrication, good thing I read my cited source!
"On September 8, 2020, Sid Meier's autobiography, Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games, was released, containing confirmation that the Gandhi software bug was fabricated and a detailed background of the urban legend's formation"
from the above link
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 running actual railroads.
Chris Sawyer made a lot of games that have since been reverse engineered lmao.
Steam and GoG have a version of Railroad Tycoon 2 which works well on modern machines:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/7620/Railroad_Tycoon_II_P...
https://www.gog.com/en/game/railroad_tycoon_2
Not quite as old-school as the first version, but IMHO gameplay-wise "just right".
Said the bus driver in the mirrored shades.
Railroad Tycoon is a strategy game with competition whereas Transport Fever is pretty much a building and optimization sandbox. Even Transport Tycoon falls more in the latter category, IMO, despite superficially having competition even in single player. (I haven't played OpenTTD in a long time so I don't know if the AIs are nowadays competent enough to make the competition interesting.)
In RRT, with cut-throat competition enabled your company can even be opportunistically bought by the competition if you aren't careful. You can also be driven out of cities by rate wars. Some of the other strategy aspects feel perhaps a bit artificial -- you can't cross the other companies' track, for example, so you can effectively cordon off areas from competition. Nevertheless, those competitive strategy aspects add a significant edge to the game.
I've also played a lot of Transport Fever. The competitive aspect, even if against the old and cheating AI, is probably one of the reasons I still end up returning to the old Railroad Tycoon now and then, though.
Some of the technical limitations of the original are somewhat frustrating, though, so I find the reverse engineering effort really interesting.
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
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.
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.
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 than the second part here).
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...
Hard pass.
I personally haven't, because it would take the fun out of the game.
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.
For me that's OpenMW
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 things like e.g. putting an industry in a town and then transporting goods there to satisfy the industry, making both your train line and the industry wildly profitable.
Usually dry as sand, but some of the heaviest games out there in terms of complexity.
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.
Not a penny for those heretic swines!
No taxation without representation!
Wery well, we shall withdraw our forces!
Because representation without taxation is a thing, and pointing at that, even as indirectly as this, is seen as "problematic".
I've played OpenTTD a bit and seems quite similar.
A question I've always had with these reverse engineering projects, can someone build off their work to do a clean room reimplantation if they avoid any code/dissembly ?
I don’t know. It just surprised me. Thought it would be the other way around.