Multiplayer tunneler \ VOGONS

Multiplayer tunneler

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First post, by gabonator

Posted on 2024-12-08, 23:22

gabonator Offline

Rank Newbie

Rank: Newbie
Posts: 16
Joined: 2021-02-11, 21:32

Felt a bit nostalgic while watching "Tetris" movie and decided to upgrade "cicoparser" assembly to C++ transpiler. Initially I have used IDA to disassemble DOS games, then switched to Ghidra and later I switched to Capstone disassembler, making the conversion tool completely standalone and simple to use. It became a quite powerful tool for disassembling real mode dos applications and I have ported several games with it. Since there was no proper explanation what is the purpose of this tool when we here dosbox already, I decided to demonstrate it by adding network multiplayer feature to an ancient game. I have chosen Tunneler as my guinea pig and check it for yourself how it looks:

https://github.com/gabonator/Projects/blob/ma … tplay/readme.md

A small teaser:
bumpy - https://rawgit.valky.eu/gabonator/Projects/re … y/js/bumpy.html

Reply 1 of 2, by gabonator

Posted on 2025-01-02, 21:43

gabonator Offline

Rank Newbie

Rank: Newbie
Posts: 16
Joined: 2021-02-11, 21:32

Another "time warp" experiment: Imagine you are playing some game where you suddenly die because of wrong or delayed movement. Game mechanics usually put you at the beginning of the level and you have to play everything again. With "trainers" or a bit hacking you can have infinite lives, buy you need to play that level again and again. With the same trick as used in network multiplayer game ports (tuneller and dyna blaster already ported with this feature), by having two game instances, where one is the one which you see and the second one is the same game, but delayed by a few seconds. When you need, you can reset your "live" instance to that backup one to play the last seconds of the game again to avoid death. With little tricks this can be done pretty neatly - instead of jumping through the timeline I slow down the time and start slowly rewinding back to the "backup" instance with nice motion blur effect, check it here:

(play the game and if you suddenly die, hold the left shift button to reverse the time)
https://rawgit.valky.eu/gabonator/Projects/re … warp/rick2.html

Reply 2 of 2, by gabonator

Posted on 2025-01-26, 01:40

gabonator Offline

Rank Newbie

Rank: Newbie
Posts: 16
Joined: 2021-02-11, 21:32

If anyone would like to try it, here is a windows batch file for converting StarGoose game:
https://github.com/gabonator/Projects/blob/ma … emo/windows.bat

Or a docker file for linux:
https://github.com/gabonator/Projects/blob/ma … demo/Dockerfile

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