Duke Nukem II source code reconstructed #Gaming #VintageComputing #ReverseEngineering @lethal_guitar
GitHub user lethal-guitar has reconstructed the source code of the game Duke Nukem II (Apogee Software, 1993), based on disassembly of the original executable. It compiles with era-appropriate toolchains and produces a binary that’s 100 % identical to the original one.
In order to create RigelEngine, I spent countless hours dissecting the original game’s assembly code in Ida Pro. But RigelEngine’s code is very different from what the original might have looked like, and many of the low-level systems aren’t represented at all since they have been replaced with modern APIs in RigelEngine.
I think it’s worthwhile to also preserve the original code as closely as possible, since – to me at least – it’s really interesting, educational, and fascinating. With my reverse-engineering work, I had already done the hardest part of recreating the code, it just wasn’t in a shape that would be easily accessible/readable to other people: The results were captured in handwritten notes, cryptic pseudocode, comments inside my Ida Pro project, and knowledge in my head.
So this is where this project comes in: Thoroughly commented C & Assembly code, which can actually be compiled into a functional DOS executable using an era-appropriate toolchain.
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