Birbla

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  • Hacker News
  • I have a friend who flew F15s. I’ve sent him this.
    by CalChris
  • Communities for these old games do an incredible job securing the four freedoms for their favourite titles, and it's truly inspiring. Great work.
    by _jackdk_
  • Many 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.
    by howard941
  • I never played this, but I did play Janes F/A-18, was a great game
    by shdh
  • Oi! And Jane's USAF!
    by peregrinus_13
  • This story is now on Youtube: https://youtu.be/aIPKkOpIiF8
    by coolwulf
  • Cool video, though the AI voiceover is jarring.
    by shdon
  • I've played this game so much on a Laser (Dutch computer brand) 286 with VGA monochrome screen, in the early '90s.
    by louwrentius
  • Man I loved this game. My friend and I would split responsibility and share the keyboard. One did the firing other the navigating
    by smrtinsert
  • A 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.
    by EdwardDiego
  • Does 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.

    by Waterluvian
  • Yes it's very helpful
    by AJenbo
  • AI is superhuman at reading and understanding assembly, it doesn't care much about if it's decompiled or has symbols, that just makes it a bit slower. In some cases it can even understand heavily obfuscated control flow directly without using tools.
    by kriztw
  • It’s ridiculously easy to port games now.

    https://robin.tooclever.org took less than a day in API time

    by gmerc
  • This is cool! Is there an index of these ported games / OSS ports?
    by npunt
  • Oh, 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...

    by imrehg
  • Aren't these names trademarked? I can imagine lockheed selling the rights for a side income lol
    by sourcegrift
  • The dev blog is one of the best retro-reversing journals you can find. Happy reading!
    by alberto-m
  • Was this the one that you could play co-op with a friend in a front seat / back seat role? Or was it III? I spent so long ringing my friend on the landline to help set up his modem configuration,then having him dial in again, starting the game, him disconnecting again, me ringing him to see what had happened that time etc. etc. When we finally got it working, we played it so incessantly that his Mum banned him from playing it over the modem as we were tying up the sole phone line for hours.

    I would love to find similar multiplayer in other flight sims, or space sims. I also really want to get this game working again and see if I can nostalgia bait my friend.

    by EdwardDiego
  • F-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...

    by raddan
  • Noob 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?

    by taffydavid
  • I had a few reasons, when I tried tackling RE of a DOS-era game a number of years ago. I wanted to document the file formats, look through the data and find unused media, identify and fix some of the more egregious bugs in the game, build modding tools for it, understand the techniques used to build something that was memorable from my childhood, reduce the friction of running it on a modern system, make available optional improvements like higher resolution, texture replacement, and so on.

    It ended up being more than I had the patience to finish. It might be doable for me now.

    by khedoros1
  • A 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

    by snerbles
  • It'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.
    by ixp_ninja
  • Playable 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

    the f15_se2-*.zip file contains the replacement executables for the DOS game

    The airforce needs YOU!

    by LowLevelMahn
  • I'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?
    by skerit
  • Dumb question, but if parts of the game are written in asm, can you create C code that produces a binary equivalent when compiled?
    by bluedino
  • USAF 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.

    by snerbles
  • Nice 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/) 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!!!!

    by yepyoukno