Hello,

I've been away from video games for a while, and I would like to announce that I have recently experienced an great rush of nostolgia for Dark Forces, Jedi Knight, and TIE Fighter. I cannot put into words the love I have for them! Ohhhhhhh!

I should play those games again, especially TIE Fighter... I only played through it once in 2001. Good times.

No other game I know of was made with such precision and craftsmanship. I say, we should go back to MIDI and pixels! Overcomplexity damages precision! We should go back to the days where making games was both a science and an art, where the developer knew every line of code and every vertex and texel like the back of his hand! I cannot express the joy I experience in starring at the massive texels on a Dark Forces Wall, or the individual pixels of a TIE Fighter cutscene.

mmm.... Dark Forces.... Played that not too long ago on an old '95 I got in the basement... wonder if my TIE fighter floppies are around somewhere....

....

*goes off to look for them*

I played TIE... a week ago! I've been making missions every two weeks for the past year or so.

Tie fighter won't run on my machine. It tells me I don't have enough ram. It requires 16mb; and I only have a gig.

Tie Fighter RULED. I miss it bad.


Gimme some suga.

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

Too bad I'm using a weird operating system that runs these games really slowly only through emulation... if only I can get my hands on the source code!

LINUX SUCKS.

go grab a decompiler and you'll have the source in C (or assembly, but who wants to deal with that?)

Decompiler that gets you original source code? What magical decompiler do you use?

There are some, but the output is so dang ugly. You will not see the original function names or varialbe names, everything is just numbered in an ugly mess. I am not even sure of the decompiled source code can be recompiled into something that will work with the game.

I agree, which is why I don't use it.

The one I've got supposedly guarantees the code can be recompiled. I haven't tried it, although I do have full backups on my HD to avoid reinstalls.

Working with LEC's binaries would be extremely hard, because the high level code was compiled into machine code with DOS and Windows code, with references to arbitrary DOS and Windows code, making it very hard to dissassemble, edit, assemble, and execute on unix. Not only would one have to remove references to DOS and Windows code, but one would also have to write unix equivilants. The best way to go about doing this would be to impliment the DOS and Windows code on unix, and people have done this for at least Windows in the Wine project. In fact, I have sucessfully executed Jedi Knight and JED in a unix enviornment, although it is problomatic and slow to run.

I know you said decompile and not disassemble, but decompiling is not a lossless conversion; i.e., you won't get the same binary by recompiling and assembling, like you should be able to by disassembling and assembling.

Sigh, I just wish companies would release source code for old games. John Carmack is a good man.

What does actually work well, however, is emulation. I've emulated a DOS enviornment and ran both Dark Forces and TIE Fighter, and they both run flawlessly. However, my Pentium 4 is not fast enough to run it at playable framerates.

I played through all of Dark Forces during the past few days... fun stuff

I got two other people hooked on it via nostalgia as well. So here we are in my dorm, all playing Dark Forces on our laptops, and the third guy came and broke the trend by playing Battlefield Vietnam... =\

I get nostalogic when thinking about the JK and MotS maps. They just had something to it that I haven't felt for a while in a game.

JK works fine with Wine, and JED works excellent with OpenGL rendering on the 3D Preview and grid.

While both JK and JED work via wine, they are problematic in my experience. But that's because everything is problematic via wine in my experience. For example, massive quantities of error dialogs display when running JED. Ignorable, but annoying. Another example is StarCraft's map editor, which does does not update parts of the screen when scrolling, similar to the "hall of mirrors" effect. (I'm just happy these work at all, however, so I'll stop complaining!)

I still have to see a mod for some game which could beat Birth of a Mercenary SE.

(Not graphical wise, you doogs)

I concur; the maps have a certain feeling of precision to them, giving an unexplainable feeling of happiness. Perhaps that's because I've spent alot of time running around in maps that I've made myself. There's something satisfying about concave geometric engines like JK's that feels so much more pleasing than a brush-edited engine, say, for example, the Quake engines. I've made a few boxes in Quake III, and after running around in them, it gives me the feeling as if it has no "soul".