▲Congrats on such an achievement. The remake looks great, but those DOS screenshots have an undeniable charm. With such a large scale game, something I always find interesting is uncovering what types of quirks and bugs bubble underneath the surface in the original version. Did you come across anything obvious in your testing?
reply▲This is such a well written story, and congratulations Ben, it sounds like it's been a lot of hard but ultimately successful work!
I know you'll deservedly get a lot of credit for all your work in remastering the game, but you should also get credit for how you've woven this narrative together, it's a lovely read. Thank you for taking the time to write it up, and good luck with the Steam release, and whatever project you take on next! :)
Thank you sir and I'm glad you enjoyed the story! I hope it's successful but we will see.
reply▲I really enjoyed this article as well!
I'm still curious, however:
> That's not a marketing angle—it's a headline that writes itself.
Any ChatGPT assistance there?
grey-area7 minutes ago
[-] I wonder why LLMs do this so persistently (the ‘it’s not this it’s that’)? Is there really so much of this style of writing out there?
reply▲tedheath12315 minutes ago
[-] I loved this game. As soon as I saw the title I knew it would be Wall Street Raider. I play it via dosbox and for me the UI is part of the charm. I’d be interested in tinkering with the pricing simulation but from the article it seems like that’s almost impossible.
reply▲This was a great thing to read this morning, kudos to both!
reply▲wewewedxfgdf1 hour ago
[-] If you dropped the source code here you'd probably get a versiojn in each of the 5 major languages quick smart.
reply▲i guess if it was public you could cheat or understand it. its incomprehnsibilty is just like the real markets - you can never know why or how
reply▲Really interesting, thanks for sharing!
I know it almost sounds crass, but you should consider letting an LLM take a crack at transpiling the code. Source to source translations are one of the most widely agreed upon strengths of LLMs.
withinboredom15 minutes ago
[-] I can tell you from reading the code in the 90s, no LLM will save you. It’s well written, but it’s not structured like modern programs. IIRC he invented his own trampoline system using goto that will leave you scratching your head for days, just trying to figure out how it works. An LLM might be able to guess, but it def isn’t going to one-shot it and that means you will need to be able to understand it as well.
reply▲Good job! When can I buy it?
I am sold on the game and wishlisted it but lack of release date saddens me.
I love spreadsheet games like Terra Invicta/Paradox/Simutrans and this seems like a terrific example of one.
If I can't get a response from a publisher here soon, I will be setting an Early Access release date of 1-2 months from now to give me some time to build up more wishlists before I pull the trigger.
reply▲Please post here when you have a date!
reply▲This is very well written. I have fairly low interest in video games and rarely read gaming content, but read this all the way through. That’s an achievement in itself!
reply▲Regarding "The Second Oldest Game Developer", there are also the authors of "Spacewar!": Steve Russell was born in 1937, meaning, he's either 89 or will be 89 this year. Dan Edwards must be around that age, as well.
reply▲blobbers16 minutes ago
[-] Spacewar.com was such a classic game. Why wasn't it an exe??
reply▲The game itself could be a good benchmark for AI agents.
reply▲thomassmith651 hour ago
[-] This is a wonderful project, and the post is a wonderful read!
Are there any plans to break out portions of the Basic engine to a modern language? It's frustrating that the heart of the game remains inscrutable. Surely Ward is tempted?
This is amazing! Having no knowledge of Basic, a.) what makes the rewrite "impossible"? b.) how do coding agents perform on the codebase? It might make for a neat benchmark similar to ARC
reply▲lelanthran38 minutes ago
[-] The BASIC from that time was pretty limited, IIRC.
No real functions, only `gosub` and `goto` so everything is a global variable.
I think even assembler for x86 is easier to unravel.
thomassmith651 hour ago
[-] I gather the version of Basic is not Object-Oriented.
So the program most likely is flat: a bunch of global variables (and possibly memory addresses), and instructions ordered by line number, rather than functions or methods.
replwoacause4 days ago
[-] I enjoyed the read. How did you tap into the legacy Power Basic engine? Was there a FFI or some kind of bridge you could hook into? And what languages were you using?
reply▲I built an FFI via event dispatching and shared memory pointers/matching structs. Imported the C++ UI layer as a DLL via Win32 LoadLibrary. The PB shares a big array for storing global pointers allowing them to read/write each other's memory. The C++ has an event queue and has DLL functions the PB can call to peek/pop the next event. It actually isn't that complicated, just took me forever to come up with the idea.
As for languages, PB, C++, and JavaScript (Electron/Preact). I chose a no-build UI framework so that it could be modded by players without installing any build tools, just edit the text files in the game folder, and it has been a very good decision.
nwellinghoff1 hour ago
[-] Indeed very clever. I wonder if you framed this problem up with claude how it would “guide” you to solve this problem. Would be an interesting match up of ai vs human. Love the story!
reply▲Fantastic. Well done! For both the new game and the website article.
reply▲... You got the source code, and it was 115 kloc of BASIC, but several other individuals and organizations failed to "reverse-engineer" it?
reply▲Others attempted to build from scratch or port it without the original developer's involvement. I worked directly with Michael and built a bridge layer into his existing codebase rather than rewriting it.
reply▲I'm sorry what is the question?
reply▲Awesome story! Well-written also.
You are the engineer we all aspired to be. Though, you really are the chosen one.
Wish you the best!
AI can’t do impossible things yet, but we still can.
reply▲You're damn right we can.
reply▲Love it and fascinated to play the game.
reply▲Cheers for this!
Thank you for sharing your story.
oh this is an absolutely fascinating story!
reply▲I forgot to ask, do you have links to any of the Reddit threads? They’d be a fun read!
reply▲blobbers16 minutes ago
[-] I feel like this is the sort of thing AI could do in 10 minutes. Did you try?
reply▲grey-area10 minutes ago
[-] Please do go ahead and report back to us in 10 minutes.
We’ll wait.