[HN Gopher] Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for ...
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Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990
Author : LowLevelMahn
Score : 147 points
Date : 2026-02-14 15:17 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vogons.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vogons.org)
| LowLevelMahn wrote:
| the developer 'Wilczek' is posting the progress on his Railroad
| Tycoon reversing in this Vogons-Thread
| nprateem wrote:
| This is such a shit AI comment, what's it even for? Trying to
| create some lame puppet accounts?
| LowLevelMahn wrote:
| that is the inital post to explain what the link referes
| to...
| qingcharles wrote:
| Thank you. I appreciate the post. I'm about to dive into
| the 1987 Elite PC version so this is actually really
| helpful.
| marticode wrote:
| I spent countless hours as a teen on that game. I feel it might
| be faster to rewrite it from scratch though than reverse engineer
| it.
| jaggederest wrote:
| It's trickier than you think! Even for the modern era, the
| railroad tycoon games are surprisingly deep and sophisticated
| economic simulations. I still haven't found one to equal
| Railroad Tycoon 3, which has this kind of neat reactive
| diffusion field pricing engine.
|
| The modern equivalents (I'm thinking of Transport Fever 2)
| while they are fun games just lacks the ability to build and
| manipulate a real economy by doing things like e.g. putting an
| industry in a town and then transporting goods there to satisfy
| the industry, making both your train line and the industry
| wildly profitable.
| nikitau wrote:
| There's also a whole, albeit niche, board game genera of so
| called 18xx game (eg. 1889 Shikoku) that deal with the
| economic aspects of 19th century railroads.
|
| Usually dry as sand, but some of the heaviest games out there
| in terms of complexity.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| I really admired Transport Tycoon which had those 3
| additionals transport channels. Have you tried it? I love the
| shuttle buses which you can use to connect to an external (to
| the city) airport, railroad track that can go throughout the
| whole map, and the ships that transport mostly oil for fun
| and profit...
| nprateem wrote:
| Would love sth like this. Any modern games (not that boring
| edutainment one about supply chains) that let you play with
| the stock market as well as doing something fun like in
| Railroad Tycoon?
| boring-human wrote:
| > I still haven't found one to equal Railroad Tycoon 3, which
| has this kind of neat reactive diffusion field pricing
| engine.
|
| My feelings exactly. I still play it regularly for this
| reason alone. A really amazing game under the hood.
|
| The Rhodes Unfinished scenario is probably my favorite. On
| the highest-difficulty level, it starts out as a hard map,
| then becomes an insatiable resource grab. By the end you're
| building vanity suspension bridges over chasms and digging
| tunnels the width of Kilimanjaro.
| unixhero wrote:
| Thanks for an insightful comment! I have two university
| degrees in Economics and have never heard of reactive
| diffusion field pricing engines until today.
| jaggederest wrote:
| There's an interesting arxiv paper here, I haven't read it
| in depth but shows some academic activity in the area at
| least
|
| https://arxiv.org/html/2502.07071v2
| pimlottc wrote:
| The image links seem to all be broken but you can see some high-
| res maps in the video starting around 1m10s
| brettermeier wrote:
| Yeah that's really sad, I really want to see some of those,
| especially with drawing stations. I hope it get fixed :) And a
| nice read btw!
| jrs235 wrote:
| Loved that game. And Sid Meier's Colonization.
| rc_kas wrote:
| Yeah so much fuzzy good memories of it. Now I want to play that
| game again.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Not a penny for those heretic swines! No taxation
| without representation!
|
| and Wery well, we shall withdraw our forces!
|
| I was really disappointed when the both the remake and the open
| source versions lost those memorable quotes.
| snvzz wrote:
| These days it's not PC to say that.
|
| Because representation without taxation is a thing, and
| pointing at that, even as indirectly as this, is seen as
| "problematic".
| vintermann wrote:
| Was "You may kiss our royal pinky ring" in them though?
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| TBH I never kissed the royal pinky ring, but as you quote
| it so literally, I'm starting to wonder about the wonderful
| English language ambiguities.
| shevy-java wrote:
| It was a pretty cool game. Not as good as e. g. civilisation but
| nonetheless fun. I even managed to make profits with my
| railroads.
|
| Young folks can use dosbox etc... but it just does not feel the
| same compared to how it was "originally". I could not get myself
| to want to play raildroad tycoon again; I found it easy to play
| games such as civilization or UFO: Enemy Unknown (oddly enough
| the first part is more playable than the second part here).
| stoneforger wrote:
| Of the games you mention it's civilization that's kind of hard
| to replay for me. RR tycoon had fewer, worse, iterations. All
| Xcom games are super replayable with the exception of Xcom 3.
| Colonization is super replayable and it's only reiteration
| based on Civ 4 is not worth it.
| fakedang wrote:
| XCOM 3?
| CyMonk wrote:
| The third game in the series is "X-COM: Apocalypse".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XCOM
| spockz wrote:
| To this day I've managed to win in every civ game but still
| have to figure out how to consistently beat Colonisation.
| suprjami wrote:
| OpenXcom adds a whole heap of wonderful conveniences to
| UFO/X-Com. It's probably my favourite open source game engine
| clone thing.
|
| https://openxcom.org/
| snvzz wrote:
| Dolls / Girls Frontline 2: Exilium[0][1][2] is a modern take
| on the XCOM concept.
|
| Free (but gacha.)
|
| 0. https://gf2exilium.sunborngame.com/main
|
| 1. https://gf2.haoplay.com/jp/
|
| 2. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3308670/GIRLS_FRONTLINE
| _2...
| suprjami wrote:
| > gacha
|
| Hard pass.
| lionkor wrote:
| > my favourite open source game engine clone thing
|
| For me that's OpenMW
|
| https://openmw.org/
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| I loved this game so much. There was a "deluxe" version with
| small improvements.
|
| I would love to play a modern version of this. Probably true for
| other strategy classics like Master of Magic, Master of Orion 2,
| Colonization.
|
| Edit: ha, I remember that I used a really good tactic of playing
| with competitors' stocks, gaining majority, siphoning tons of
| money from them, and then selling the stocks. More profitable
| than running actual railroads.
| boxed wrote:
| https://www.openttd.org/ ?
| Krutonium wrote:
| https://openloco.io/ too!
|
| Chris Sawyer made a lot of games that have since been reverse
| engineered lmao.
| Neil44 wrote:
| I've been playing for the last year or two. Great game.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| > I would love to play a modern version of this.
|
| Steam and GoG have a version of Railroad Tycoon 2 which works
| well on modern machines:
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/7620/Railroad_Tycoon_II_P...
|
| https://www.gog.com/en/game/railroad_tycoon_2
|
| Not quite as old-school as the first version, but IMHO
| gameplay-wise "just right".
| spockz wrote:
| I have been hooked on Transport Fever for a while now. My only
| gripe with it is that civilian vehicles will take roads
| intended for cargo/public transport traffic only. So the most
| profitable way is to disconnect entire cities by road and then
| use rail or road with disjunct depots to connect cargo to
| cities. This way you can force civilians to use public
| transport.
| amenhotep wrote:
| Using "civilian" to mean "a civilian who's not a cop" was
| already bad enough, but using it to differentiate private
| cars from trucks and _buses_? Public transport is practically
| the quintessential example of civilian infrastructure, you
| 're really going too far now.
| spockz wrote:
| My apologies, you are right. I maybe should have used the
| term NPC? Or non-controllable vehicles.
| avhception wrote:
| There is also a great re-make of Star Control 2
| https://sc2.sourceforge.net/
| ksherlock wrote:
| Civilization 4 (currently on sale for $6 at gog) includes a
| colonization mode. I don't like it as much as the original but
| that's probably my nostalgia bias
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Congratulations, that's something really good!
| KSteffensen wrote:
| Please fix the integer overflow. Total income over the game was
| tracked in a 32-bit signed int, so if you earned too much money
| suddenly the total would turn negative and your stocks would
| crash.
| jrs235 wrote:
| I never found the bug in that direction. I discovered it the
| opposite way: when starting out, selling shares (or was it
| taking loans?) all the shares you can. Get around 30+ million
| in the hole and continue to lose money. Eventually an
| arithmetic overflow will occur and then suddenly you'll have a
| net worth of like $30-40 million and have the money form
| selling stock to build to your heart's content.
| saidnooneever wrote:
| hahah this was it! make so many debt ur suddenly rich haha.
| kinda like evil corpos do today no? hahahha
| dijit wrote:
| "Too big to fail"... ironically a very realistic _feature_.
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| As described by the posts, the original used 16-bit signed
| integers. The fix was to switch to 32-bit.
| zeristor wrote:
| Sounds like the famous Gandhi bug in Civilisation:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi
|
| edit: turns out this was a fabrication, good thing I read my
| cited source!
|
| "On September 8, 2020, Sid Meier's autobiography, Sid Meier's
| Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games, was released, containing
| confirmation that the Gandhi software bug was fabricated and a
| detailed background of the urban legend's formation"
|
| from the above link
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but it seems like all the struggles
| are in rendering and barely nothing in terms of game logic.
|
| I don't know. It just surprised me. Thought it would be the other
| way around.
| rustyhancock wrote:
| Loved watching my brother play this game growing up, it was a bit
| too complex for me!
|
| I've played OpenTTD a bit and seems quite similar.
|
| A question I've always had with these reverse engineering
| projects, can someone build off their work to do a clean room
| reimplantation if they avoid any code/dissembly ?
| butz wrote:
| Could someone refer to any good entry level DOS games reverse
| engineering materials? I dabbled a bit with NES hacking, but I'm
| finding it hard to get into DOS reverse engineering. What
| debugger to use? Any gotchas I should know in advance?
| trollbridge wrote:
| LLMs are actually great for reverse engineering small chunks of
| code now.
| LowLevelMahn wrote:
| Tools: IDA Pro 5 (Freeware) is the last Freeware version able
| to handle DOS executeables (official available by the ScummVM
| devs https://www.scummvm.org/news/20180331/) - IDA Pro still
| supports DOS-stuff with latest release - but not the freeware
|
| or Ghidra - but the DOS/16bit support is sometimes lacky - but
| the decompiler is builtin
|
| here is a list of articles to read:
| https://forum.stunts.hu/index.php?topic=4287.0
| zabzonk wrote:
| Borland's debugger (came with Borland C++) was very good, if
| you can get hold of it. I removed copy protection from several
| games I owned using it, and actually fixed mouse support for
| another game.
| sevensor wrote:
| Gotcha: once you get into it, hacking the game gets to be way
| more fun than actually playing it. Way back in the day I used
| the DOS debug utility to edit my Bard's Tale savegames. But
| once everybody has 127 hit points and -10 AC, the game gets way
| less interesting.
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