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DOS Game "F-15 Strike Eagle II" reversing project needs DOS test pilots
- LowLevelMahn 3mo agoPlayable DOS version available First step was the full reverse to assembler, second step is to convert the assembler to binary equal compiled C code, all this still on DOS until no assembler code is left, then the porting to Linux,Windows will start Reversing tends to bring in new bugs and its not easy to find all bugs in such old and reversed code - but so far everything seems to work try finding open bugs if you got version 451.03 of F-15 around combined with Dosbox or a real DOS find latest DOS release here: https://github.com/neuviemeporte/f15se2-re/releases https://github.com/neuviemeporte/f15se2-re/releases the f15_se2-*.zip file contains the replacement executables for the DOS game The airforce needs YOU!
- yepyoukno 3mo agoNice work! I’m not sure you should beat yourself up too much for a Linix* port, emulators are so well supported and ubiquitous, if it works there (not everything does), call it a win! I use Lutris (https://lutris.net/ https://lutris.net/) for its ease of use. I can see your a “low level mahn” and this may be more of a quest for you than playing a cool retro game. Any which way, GREAT WORK!!!!
- LowLevelMahn 3mo agoits mostly the combined work of AJenbo, neuviemeporte and others - my part is very small, fixing some compilation problems with newer compilers and spreading the news C source needs to get compiled on every platform reachable - that is a must :)
- skerit 3mo agoI'm currently reverse engineering a few games too. It's quite easy with AI now. But I'm worried about the legality of it all. Any thoughts on this?
- habagav 3mo agoYou could do “clean room engineering” approach where the reversing agent generates a specification from its findings, and then have a separate agent reimplement the code without seeing the original binaries/code. You’d just have to make sure the specification doesn’t include actual source snippets (the AI will try this if you don’t specify). Pseudo code would be sufficient I guess where necessary.
- alberto-m 3mo agoUnless you develop your AI agent from scratch or you clone a never-released game, it would be extremely easy for the rightholders to claim that both agents have most certainly ingested the binary during their training phase, since it's well known that the hyperscalers have pirated everything that could be pirated to train their LLMs. Which is why malus.sh is a parody, not a real service. One should be honest about what one builds. The F-15 project does that: the aim is the reconstruction of the original game, down to the opcodes; on the other hands it requires the user to provide the original game assets.
- skerit 3mo ago> it would be extremely easy for the rightholders to claim that both agents have most certainly ingested the binary during their training phase Ingested the binary?
- habagav 3mo agoIf they try to claim that then they need proof, right? Good luck getting that.
- luckydata 3mo agoJust no, this isn't a thing at all.
- justinclift 3mo ago> ingested the binary during their training phase That's extremely unlikely. The pirating seems to have been of eBooks, which were first converted to text, losing graphics and such too. That's my understanding anyway, from reading a few reports. :)
- snerbles 3mo agoUSAF veteran here. I grew up on F-15 Strike Eagle II, and unfortunately my copy has long since degraded. I am elated to see this project. I do have one teeny, tiny, personal pedantic grumble that is sure to bring other the branches out of the woodwork to point out how much I love chairs. Air Force. Two words. Thanks.
- ixp_ninja 3mo agoFixed (might need a Shift-Ctrl-R reload). Apologies, English is not my first language.
- snerbles 3mo agoNo worries, in some languages it is indeed one word - like Luftwaffe. I've seen many native English speakers routinely bang out "airforce", so it's not just an ESL thing.
- irishcoffee 3mo agoYou spelled chair force wrong!
- bluedino 3mo agoDumb question, but if parts of the game are written in asm, can you create C code that produces a binary equivalent when compiled?
- LowLevelMahn 3mo agono thats nearly impossible
- mikerg87 3mo agoI posted this to twosopbts.com so that one more retro gaming community will know of the call
- cf100clunk 3mo ago> twosopbts.com I'm not getting DNS NX results.
- slater 3mo agohttps://twostopbits.com/item?id=9081 https://twostopbits.com/item?id=9081
- Waterluvian 3mo agoDoes AI fit well in trying to reason about the structure of a decompiled project when you lack symbol names? This isn’t my wheelhouse but I was surprised just how well AI could figure out the intent of the structure of some JavaScript where I had no source maps.
- louwrentius 3mo agoI've played this game so much on a Laser (Dutch computer brand) 286 with VGA monochrome screen, in the early '90s.
- imrehg 3mo agoOh, this was one that I played a lot as a kid! (Alongside F-19 Stealth Fighter, F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter - the two that apparently came before and after this game - TIL, and to a lesser extent F-14 Tomcat) I think, this needs the original game files to run, if I read things correctly. So probably just gonna read the dev journals, rather than fly this particular bird again...
- sourcegrift 3mo agoAren't these names trademarked? I can imagine lockheed selling the rights for a side income lol
- swiftcoder 3mo agoSame as for any game that uses real car brands or gun manufacturers, quite a few of these companies are willing to license for certain types of game
- tecleandor 3mo agoThe F-19 denomination was never used, they skipped from F-18 to F-20. The game was based on what they believed that the stealth fighter (F-117) was going to be before it was publicly acknowledged. So maybe it wasn't trademarked. (Or maybe they trademarked everything just in case...) Vaguely similar to the F-29 Retaliator game, that was based in the X-29 experimental fighter, but not in an existing F-29 of any kind.
- rzzzt 3mo agoWhat about the Su-27 and Eurofighter games (from a bit later)?
- alberto-m 3mo agoThe dev blog is one of the best retro-reversing journals you can find. Happy reading!
- raddan 3mo agoF-19 is a great game and one of my favorite Sid Meier titles ever. I remember buying it from Electronics Boutique in the late 1980s and playing it on our Packard Bell 286. The game's copy protection mechanism required you to look up aircraft in the manual and identify them. The consequence was that I memorized the entire set of aircraft in the game. I even bought a Gravis Analog joystick to play the game and I still have the keyboard overlay. I would love a modern reboot of this game...
- smrtinsert 3mo agoMan I loved this game. My friend and I would split responsibility and share the keyboard. One did the firing other the navigating
- EdwardDiego 3mo agoA friend and I did this with Privateer II (the one with incessant FMV starring a young Clive Owen) - pilot on the gamepad, navigator / weapons officer on the keyboard.
- bigmattystyles 3mo agoIf it's the game I'm thinking of, floppy copies were going around my middle school in France at the time but this was a game that without the manual, good luck even getting the plane off the ground. I seem to recall a mode where you started out in the air. Fun times.
- tecleandor 3mo agoThat happened to me, at least, with F-29 Retaliator. Your best bet was starting a mission already in the air, as the game (IIRC) didn't include any tutorials.
- rzzzt 3mo agoThe mission scenario descriptions were circulating both as a text file and in the hint section of a computer magazine we had, but I didn't get either for a long time. "Zulu alert" mode lets you take as many enemies off the sky as you can, with infinite ammo. Edit: I now remember that the first training mission is something like "shoot two target practice boards in sector E5". You have to be very meticulous to find those just by flying around!
- raddan 3mo agoYou definitely needed the manual. But an 8-year old version of me mastered the game so it couldn't have been that hard. FWIW, the manual is a masterpiece. I really miss all the ancillaries that came with early computer games.
- EdwardDiego 3mo agoThat reminds me of when a friend convinced me to try to get into Falcon BMS. The community has created thousands of pages of documentation on flying the Falcon, operating the various weapon systems, as well as things like energy management, formation flying techniques etc. etc. https://wiki.falcon-bms.com/en/manuals https://wiki.falcon-bms.com/en/manuals It's really impressive, but I did not have the time to put into learning it.
- shdh 3mo agoI never played this, but I did play Janes F/A-18, was a great game
- peregrinus_13 3mo agoOi! And Jane's USAF!
- MajorTakeaway 3mo agoI played US Navy Fighters and that reminded me of this game, shortly after playing it for a year I had received Jane's F-16 as a 13th birthday present.
- gmerc 3mo agoIt’s ridiculously easy to port games now. https://robin.tooclever.org https://robin.tooclever.org took less than a day in API time
- aiponzischeme 3mo ago[flagged]
- gmerc 3mo agoCalm down babe, I’ve been doing game disassembly, emulation and ports for a few decades by now. It’s just a fact that it has become ridiculously easy with top end models, because they locate every know piece of information out there. Can’t deny it.
- npunt 3mo agoThis is cool! Is there an index of these ported games / OSS ports?
- howard941 3mo agoMany hours expended on building up doppler maps in flight to use to shoot SLAMs with. An excellent sim along with Digital Integrations' Tornado which really needs a reboot.
- holoduke 3mo agoIs this game similar to retaliator?
- rasz 3mo agoAfaik Retaliator is more arcade.
- taffydavid 3mo agoNoob question. I really hope this doesn't come across as negativity. I love that people spend time on making old games work, but why do people decompile games that can be emulated by DOSbox or the like? Surely a game this old runs absolutely fine on even very low end hardware?
- snerbles 3mo agoA lot of floppy-based games have on-disk copy protection patterns that take advantage of undocumented behavior of disk drives at the time. So much so that tools like Greaseweazle [0] are necessary to compose full magnetic flux maps of archived floppies. Another thing is that these games are often made to run on a wide variety of graphics and sound hardware, and effectively have drivers compiled into them. [0] https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle
- ixp_ninja 3mo agoIt's not about running the game, it's about having it open for modification. Patching a game in binary form is ridiculously hard, anything than simple bugfixes is mostly a no-go. With the source code available we can add entire features, port it to Windows 10, implement 4K HDR, textures, new models, new missions... the sky's the limit. Additionally, it's really hard to analyze the game from assembly opcodes with hardcoded data offsets. With C code either we can read what it does directly, or add instrumentation or debugging code to it to figure it out.
- skywal_l 3mo agoAnd personally, I prefer doing ./game, rather than having to install a bunch of stuff and see my system cluttered by hidden folders.
- taffydavid 3mo agoOk but - and again I'm trying not to be negative, simply trying to understand - if you want a flight sim that works on Windows 10 and supports 4k HDR, wouldn't it be a lot easier to just build it from scratch, rather than trying to decompile a game from 1989 that came on 5¼ inch floppies? I mean, even if someone just _gave_ you the source code of the 1989 game it would be more work to port it to Windows or as a feature than it would be to just build your own 90s era air combat game in c++ without any baggage. Is it simply about squeezing more out of a classic game we love?
- coolwulf 3mo agoThis story is now on Youtube: https://youtu.be/aIPKkOpIiF8 https://youtu.be/aIPKkOpIiF8
- shdon 3mo agoCool video, though the AI voiceover is jarring.
- _jackdk_ 3mo agoCommunities for these old games do an incredible job securing the four freedoms for their favourite titles, and it's truly inspiring. Great work.
- CalChris 3mo agoI have a friend who flew F15s. I’ve sent him this.