MattKC, who developed much of this original work, has a nice Youtube channel full of video postmortems for some of these [2]. It's kind of fun just to watch him poke around with a hex editor, unraveling the arcane mysteries of a long-sunken civilization of Win95 developers.
I love the dedication content like this shows off. In an age of ever decreasing attention spans, it's nice to see someone going through the grunt work for something other than pure financial gain.
* https://github.com/isledecomp/reccmp is a lint tool which compares compiled function reimplementations with the original binary and produces an automated report detailing the instruction level accuracy of the re-implementation, while dealing with all of the fun of C++.
* https://github.com/isledecomp/SIEdit is a resource editor for the bizarre RIFF-esque resource streaming format the original developer (Mindscape) seems to have invented.
Also while we're on the subject of vintage LEGO games, I've recently been quite into playing Manic Miners, a complete Unreal Engine remake (not decompilation/reimplementation, an actual ground-up recreation!) of Rock Raiders.
I'm hoping someone does Alpha Team next; it was a quite fun puzzle game but incredibly buggy.
In particular it was interesting learning about D3D retained mode as I did that part. What a weird piece of rendering history.
Worth a search if you haven't heard about it before: D3DRM.
I’m happy to talk about the tools and process or anything anyone else in chat wants to know about. I have about 10kloc contributed and worked on tooling and build, but still have a lot to learn myself.
I watch a lot of these sorts of projects on youtube, my big takeaway is that I probably should learn how to use Ghidra.
This repo looks like a good reference.
Lego Loco is a city builder and railroad builder game. Something like a more basic SimCity and Railroad Tycoon crossover maybe. I really liked Lego Loco because you can build a whole city out of Lego to your own liking.
So I had Lego building in Lego Loco and I had Lego Island with all the fun stories and things you could do there, like chasing Pepper the criminal with a helicopter and using donuts and pizzas to help the police on ground and the skateboarder.
I kind of miss screensavers actually
Also, second you on LEGO Loco. Of the original trilogy (Creator, Loco, and Chess), Loco by far was the most fun. Kudos to the Chess King though, saying the Knights are BMX bikeriders still hasn't been surpassed.
