Developer restores co-op in DOS Wing Commander
The gist
Developer danielrh spent 11 years adding co-op to DOS Wing Commander, now playable in a browser.
The effort began with childhood sessions where he and his brother shared one craft.
How it unfolded
- Oct 4, 2015While playing Wing Commander in DOSBox, danielrh realized the game's memory probably fit in 640K and conceived of dumping memory to find the X,Y,Z coordinates for the player and wingman so network packets could control the wingman.
- Oct 2015Using DOSBox MEMDUMPBIN snapshots of an empty region of space, he measured byte churn, narrowed 35 distinct byte clusters to a dozen locations and then to 13D3:A9C2, where adding integers with the DOSBox SM command jolted the ship forward; velocity was identified at CAE2.
- Sep 2016He set the problem down for nearly a year, then decided to write a small tool to automatically compare DOSBox snapshots instead of relying only on the vbindiff GUI.
Key terms
- co-op
- A video game mode where players work together as teammates against computer-controlled opponents.
- DOS
- A family of disk-based operating systems for IBM PC compatible computers.
- DOSBox
- A free and open-source emulator for running MS-DOS programs, primarily video games.
Source: Wikipedia