Show HN: Play DOS Wing Commander co-op in browser (11 years of reversing)

I've always wanted to play Wing Commander with friends, so we could
fly the story missions together. In 2015, I hypothesized that the full
game state fit in the data segment (only 64k), and I could do small
position and orientation experiments with vbindiff to discover how the
memory was organized. Some fun findings: the camera was in entity index
0x3D (a "3D" joke?). My brother, Patrick, figured out Borland's overlay
loader crashed the game until we made our stub look like a real stack
frame. To play you need your own copy (e.g. the GOG version) and you
drag setup.exe into the browser. It's a DOSBox mod: no game files are
hosted. We reversed the game by hand, but LLMs were used for the
recent browser/peer-to-peer WebRTC with voice chat port recently,
and we continue to use them for ongoing work.I'll be in the lobby for some hours if anyone wants to fly together.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50153873

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