Nice work!

I reverse-engineered a lot of the file formats for the game F-15 Strike Eagle III and documented them here (and didn't even finish documenting everything I figured out), but it turns out not many people remember that game, so I didn't bother going on to actually mod it. Maybe one day I'll find just one person who would be interested in such a thing; perhaps if I'd done all of that 14 years or so earlier - when the game was actually new - it would have helped! 😁

More recently I've found things to reverse-engineer which even fewer people are excited by - various old document file formats and related things: DynaText; WordCruncher; HyperReader/HyperWriter; table of contents files for Microsoft TechNet/MSDN. I actually found people who'd be interested in HyperReader/HyperWriter though, so I ought to finish that off and publish the code!

doshea wrote on 2025-08-27, 11:58:

More recently I've found things to reverse-engineer which even fewer people are excited by - various old document file formats and related things: DynaText; WordCruncher; HyperReader/HyperWriter; table of contents files for Microsoft TechNet/MSDN. I actually found people who'd be interested in HyperReader/HyperWriter though, so I ought to finish that off and publish the code!

Believe it or not, people will thank you even if they use your tools someday and have no idea who you are. Just think about how many tools you use today to work with old systems, documents, etc... What you are doing is important work. Lots of stuff is locked up in those old file formats; business data, designs, stories, etc... People will take your tools for granted, of course, but some tasks would have been impossible without you.

Not to mention that the skills you learn by doing this will be invaluable to you later. I use the skills I developed doing game modding almost daily in my work (legacy aerospace engineering) where documentation has been lost decades ago and I need to reverse engineer firmware payloads. I saved a multimillion dollar contract (and avoided a lengthy and very costly redesign) earlier this year by reverse-engineering such a system and developing new means to package data for an old weapons management system (semi-classified stuff, so I can't get too detailed.)

Heck, there is currently a $30M effort in California to get their subway system off floppies and (humorous to me) talk about how difficult and expensive it is because none of the engineers they can hire understand these "old" systems, floppies, etc... (have they ever heard of gotek drives?)

I have a couple of really cool looking Smith Corona Word Processors (PWP 5400 LR) which allowed for running custom applications from 3.5" disk and I have been wanting to reverse engineer them to figure out how to make my own custom applications as well as swapping the spreadsheets/documents to a windows system. The hardware and specs are pretty much identical to a Macintosh. My current limitation is finding any examples of the original software/applications to reverse engineer.

I did forget one other game example: that same friend was into Hentai games and one particular series was based all on the same engine. I had created some tools for him to translate the games to English. Not a huge effort except for the requirement to patch the files without disturbing the original code.

I had also did some work translating some foreign graphic adventure games and recently some C64 software that was only available in German.

Not nearly as much as I wish I had, there were a few more I still have on old hard drives that I have no guarantee are still good, but I do have pictures of one I rescued already, my first actually fully completed and working mod. It was a couple power plants for SimCity 4 based on the MSRE, both directly for the basic 8MWe version and upscaled all the way to 3GWe. The modelling is absolutely not Maxis-quality (and I've improved on that aspect a lot since then), but hey, I was like 15 and more used to Blender 2.79 than I was Gmax.

One that never got beyond a few HUD modifications and a custom map or two was a horror mod for Half-Life... I forget most of the details, unfortunately. Vampires were probably involved. I remember I wanted a cinematic opening on a train and NPCs with good enough pathfinding to actually feel like human beings, but that's about it. I was also about 15 at the time and just wasn't that competent at the time (and really, I'm still not), and I didn't have the time to get better what with high school.

I do want to get more into it, but I think it might be more realistic to start way smaller, I'm kind of looking at Super Mario World ROM hacking. I still want a sequel to SMB2 (the western one) and that's probably the best bet for an engine for that.

Some movement to go back and mod or reverse engineer some retro games sounds fun to me. I am not really certain what I would target, though.

Great work, btw.

I did some patches / bug fixes for old games. Most of the time went into Drakan: Order of the Flame.

while I've looked and done a tiny bit of hex file editing on either exe or save game, its something i'd like to look at again in more depth. There are lots of old games where changing a constant or skipping a conditional might be fun, i should look around for guides and examples, this sounds like a challenge and fun too

If you want to try your hand on easy game modding. Wolfenstein 3D level and graphics/sound editing needs allmost no learning curve and to do not have to be and engineer/architect and know intimate details of the engine. And you have good DOS based classic tools.

doshea wrote on 2025-08-27, 11:58:

here (and didn't even finish documenting everything I figured out), but it turns out not many people remember that game, so I didn't bother going on to actually mod it. Maybe one day I'll find just one person who would be interested in such a thing; perhaps if I'd done all of that 14 years or so earlier - when the game was actually new - it would have helped! 😁

We classic MicroProse fans may be a shrinking niche, but we are out there. https://pixelwings.org/ and https://www.tales-from-darkenedroom.com/ show that we are lovers of military simulations in general, and in its heyday MicroProse was among the best producers of them. I am not a modder (though I am a collector), but links posted in case others may be interested in the fruits of labors elsewhere.