Despite what Paul Barnett's Twitter indicates, there's no source code out there for the original game. It'd have to be built
Wait, you mean the source code for Wing Commander I is lost?
Despite what Paul Barnett's Twitter indicates, there's no source code out there for the original game. It'd have to be built
Wait, you mean the source code for Wing Commander I is lost?
Forgive my technical ignorance, but how can the source code be lost?? Isn't there a way to open up any of the copies of WC1 floating around the internet and pull the source from it?
No, it's sort of like baking a cake--after you've compiled source code (and all the resources) into the finished game you can't get your eggs back.
No, it's sort of like baking a cake--after you've compiled source code (and all the resources) into the finished game you can't get your eggs back.
Yes--EA does not have any sort of archive of Origin's resources. In many cases they don't even have finished builds of old games anymore.
How did that happen?
What happened to all of that stuff when Origin closed?
You know I've read dozens of books about software engineering and I don't think any of them managed to make the explanation that simple.
You can pretty easily disassemble an executable, and there do exist decompilers which can give you back source code in the original language.
Maybe there's a serious effort to control a copy of everything for major games produced today, but not 10-20 years ago.
Forgive my technical ignorance, but how can the source code be lost?? Isn't there a way to open up any of the copies of WC1 floating around the internet and pull the source from it?
People always point this out and maybe it's something that's technically possible... but for lots of practical reasons it just *doesn't happen*. If people could actually reasonably generate the source code to old games from their executables then it's the kind of thing that would, you know, actually happen.
There was no corporate oversight and no money to 'waste' on elaborate backup systems... this was a company that struggled to pay for essental software packages and modern computers for their employees.
Wing Commander I's development, especially came before, well, Wing Commander I. They didn't necessarily know what they had and it certainly wasn't making them any money yet (and cost plenty!).
And you know, who saw the need at the time? There was no video game nostalgia in 1991--everybody wanted the latest greatest release and they wanted it to blow away the previous one... as quickly as possible. With a limited, pre-EA budget why pay to make sure there was a permanent chain of 'Space Rogue' resources when that money could make sure Wing Commander II *really talks*?
That's all the more reason to have backups. What if the building burned down? What if a hard drive went bad? All that work would be lost and all you invested in the development would be completely out the window.
It would be enough trouble that no company is going to bother with it, but if you were just dying to have it, it could be done.
Software companies just don't work this way. Even back then. The company I currently work for predates Origin, and they were small at the time too, and yet they still kept track of the source code to every version of the software they released. And that was even less likely to be useful again than an old game.
Surely there must be some form of source otherwise how did the ks versions get made up? i imagine at the very least there's a source for that, and if whoever made the port is like me, then they'll have made a backup of the original source at the start!
There's a list of completed-but-unreleased games as long as my arm that are lost to history because Origin didn't have some system for preserving them (Wing Commander 2 SNES, Bioforge Plus, Ultima 8 Lost Vale, Wing Commander 3 Saturn and so on).
The thing that makes me think it isn't tenable is the fact that there aren't fans who do this. Every classic gaming fandom wants the source code to their favorite games... and no one has reverse engineered it in this fashion. If it were something that was just a matter of needing more effort than companies are willing to pay for we would see people like the Standoff guys doing it at least occasionally.
The thing that makes me think it isn't tenable is the fact that there aren't fans who do this. Every classic gaming fandom wants the source code to their favorite games... and no one has reverse engineered it in this fashion. If it were something that was just a matter of needing more effort than companies are willing to pay for we would see people like the Standoff guys doing it at least occasionally.
Wing Commander won't be reversed engineered though, theres no real motivation to do so given that DOSbox can run it well.
You said you had the Wing Commander II final project archive in your possession. Does that include the source code? Because if so, that could help considerably in interpreting a decompile of Wing Commander I, because they presumably have a lot in common.
Wow. They lost so much stuff even in the Wing Commander 3 era?
Crazy. They had enough money to pay off the actors, but not some spare dolloars to buy a a decent server together with backup software?
How did the EA managers allow this to happen so many times? Origin was under EA supervision since 1992. I mean, if even only one project would "disappear" that way, I would expect that the management would be extremely pissed off