alt Hacker NewsOk 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?
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be negative, no problem - the goal is different - we are foremost developers that like the challenge to get the game back into its source state - its interesting to see on an algorithmic level how the devs got it working at that time with all this hardcore constrains (It's like the joy of an archaeologist unearthing an old wooden tool.) - for many developers gaming was the startpoint of interest in software development, and reversing is the gold-class, all your life long expirience needs to be on point to be able to reach such a goal, maybe hard to understand for non-developers - and only a few people on the world are able to do that (even with LLMs) and developers praise these ones :)
For an example of what a "finished" product of this work looks like, check out Cannonball at https://github.com/djyt/cannonball/wiki, an Out Run remake preserving the original game logic.
I could do you one better, if I just wanted a flight sim that works on Win10 with 4K HDR, I could just install DCS with the F15 module from Steam and call it a day. ;) I just happen to love this particular game, and would like to see it transcend its limitations. I am also an enthusiast of MS-DOS and early x86 hardware, so digging through all that stuff is pure joy for me, and I don't see it as "work" or "baggage".