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Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990
- marticode 7mo agoI spent countless hours as a teen on that game. I feel it might be faster to rewrite it from scratch though than reverse engineer it.
- jaggederest 7mo agoIt's trickier than you think! Even for the modern era, the railroad tycoon games are surprisingly deep and sophisticated economic simulations. I still haven't found one to equal Railroad Tycoon 3, which has this kind of neat reactive diffusion field pricing engine. 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.
- nikitau 7mo agoThere's also a whole, albeit niche, board game genera of so called 18xx game (eg. 1889 Shikoku) that deal with the economic aspects of 19th century railroads. Usually dry as sand, but some of the heaviest games out there in terms of complexity.
- p0w3n3d 7mo agoI really admired Transport Tycoon which had those 3 additionals transport channels. Have you tried it? I love the shuttle buses which you can use to connect to an external (to the city) airport, railroad track that can go throughout the whole map, and the ships that transport mostly oil for fun and profit...
- nprateem 7mo agoWould love sth like this. Any modern games (not that boring edutainment one about supply chains) that let you play with the stock market as well as doing something fun like in Railroad Tycoon?
- boring-human 7mo ago> I still haven't found one to equal Railroad Tycoon 3, which has this kind of neat reactive diffusion field pricing engine. 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.
- unixhero 7mo agoThanks for an insightful comment! I have two university degrees in Economics and have never heard of reactive diffusion field pricing engines until today.
- jaggederest 7mo agoThere's an interesting arxiv paper here, I haven't read it in depth but shows some academic activity in the area at least https://arxiv.org/html/2502.07071v2 https://arxiv.org/html/2502.07071v2
- pimlottc 7mo agoThe image links seem to all be broken but you can see some high-res maps in the video starting around 1m10s
- brettermeier 7mo agoYeah that's really sad, I really want to see some of those, especially with drawing stations. I hope it get fixed :) And a nice read btw!
- jrs235 7mo agoLoved that game. And Sid Meier's Colonization.
- rc_kas 7mo agoYeah so much fuzzy good memories of it. Now I want to play that game again.
- p0w3n3d 7mo agoNot a penny for those heretic swines! No taxation without representation! and Wery well, we shall withdraw our forces! I was really disappointed when the both the remake and the open source versions lost those memorable quotes.
- snvzz 7mo agoThese days it's not PC to say that. Because representation without taxation is a thing, and pointing at that, even as indirectly as this, is seen as "problematic".
- vintermann 7mo agoWas "You may kiss our royal pinky ring" in them though?
- p0w3n3d 7mo agoTBH I never kissed the royal pinky ring, but as you quote it so literally, I'm starting to wonder about the wonderful English language ambiguities.
- huflungdung 7mo ago[dead]
- shevy-java 7mo agoIt was a pretty cool game. Not as good as e. g. civilisation but nonetheless fun. I even managed to make profits with my railroads. 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).
- stoneforger 7mo agoOf the games you mention it's civilization that's kind of hard to replay for me. RR tycoon had fewer, worse, iterations. All Xcom games are super replayable with the exception of Xcom 3. Colonization is super replayable and it's only reiteration based on Civ 4 is not worth it.
- suprjami 7mo agoOpenXcom adds a whole heap of wonderful conveniences to UFO/X-Com. It's probably my favourite open source game engine clone thing. https://openxcom.org/ https://openxcom.org/
- snvzz 7mo ago
- simonebrunozzi 7mo agoI loved this game so much. There was a "deluxe" version with small improvements. 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.
- boxed 7mo agohttps://www.openttd.org/ https://www.openttd.org/ ?
- flohofwoe 7mo ago> I would love to play a modern version of this. 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_Platinum/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/7620/Railroad_Tycoon_II_P... https://www.gog.com/en/game/railroad_tycoon_2 https://www.gog.com/en/game/railroad_tycoon_2 Not quite as old-school as the first version, but IMHO gameplay-wise "just right".
- spockz 7mo agoI have been hooked on Transport Fever for a while now. My only gripe with it is that civilian vehicles will take roads intended for cargo/public transport traffic only. So the most profitable way is to disconnect entire cities by road and then use rail or road with disjunct depots to connect cargo to cities. This way you can force civilians to use public transport.
- LowLevelMahn 7mo agothe developer 'Wilczek' is posting the progress on his Railroad Tycoon reversing in this Vogons-Thread
- nprateem 7mo agoThis is such a shit AI comment, what's it even for? Trying to create some lame puppet accounts?
- LowLevelMahn 7mo agothat is the inital post to explain what the link referes to...
- qingcharles 7mo agoThank you. I appreciate the post. I'm about to dive into the 1987 Elite PC version so this is actually really helpful.
- p0w3n3d 7mo agoCongratulations, that's something really good!
- KSteffensen 7mo agoPlease fix the integer overflow. Total income over the game was tracked in a 32-bit signed int, so if you earned too much money suddenly the total would turn negative and your stocks would crash.
- jrs235 7mo agoI never found the bug in that direction. I discovered it the opposite way: when starting out, selling shares (or was it taking loans?) all the shares you can. Get around 30+ million in the hole and continue to lose money. Eventually an arithmetic overflow will occur and then suddenly you'll have a net worth of like $30-40 million and have the money form selling stock to build to your heart's content.
- saidnooneever 7mo agohahah this was it! make so many debt ur suddenly rich haha. kinda like evil corpos do today no? hahahha
- boredhedgehog 7mo agoAs described by the posts, the original used 16-bit signed integers. The fix was to switch to 32-bit.
- zeristor 7mo agoSounds like the famous Gandhi bug in Civilisation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi 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
- wodenokoto 7mo agoMaybe I’m reading it wrong, but it seems like all the struggles are in rendering and barely nothing in terms of game logic. I don’t know. It just surprised me. Thought it would be the other way around.
- rustyhancock 7mo agoLoved watching my brother play this game growing up, it was a bit too complex for me! 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 ?
- butz 7mo agoCould someone refer to any good entry level DOS games reverse engineering materials? I dabbled a bit with NES hacking, but I'm finding it hard to get into DOS reverse engineering. What debugger to use? Any gotchas I should know in advance?
- trollbridge 7mo agoLLMs are actually great for reverse engineering small chunks of code now.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- LowLevelMahn 7mo agoTools: IDA Pro 5 (Freeware) is the last Freeware version able to handle DOS executeables (official available by the ScummVM devs https://www.scummvm.org/news/20180331/ https://www.scummvm.org/news/20180331/) - IDA Pro still supports DOS-stuff with latest release - but not the freeware 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 https://forum.stunts.hu/index.php?topic=4287.0
- zabzonk 7mo agoBorland's debugger (came with Borland C++) was very good, if you can get hold of it. I removed copy protection from several games I owned using it, and actually fixed mouse support for another game.
- sevensor 7mo agoGotcha: once you get into it, hacking the game gets to be way more fun than actually playing it. Way back in the day I used the DOS debug utility to edit my Bard’s Tale savegames. But once everybody has 127 hit points and -10 AC, the game gets way less interesting.
- Rayosay 7mo agoSpice86 has a pretty good built-in debugger. I found it much easier to work with than DosBox's debugger. Spice86's DOS emulation isn't as good as DosBox's yet, but it's getting better all the time. https://github.com/OpenRakis/Spice86 https://github.com/OpenRakis/Spice86 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.