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Reversing Wing Commander to find the entity table in 64k to add co-op

I've always wanted to play Wing Commander with friends, so we could fly the story missions together. In 2015, I hypothesized that the full game state fit in the data segment (only 64k), and I could do small position…

DTLifestyle & entertainment

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I've always wanted to play Wing Commander with friends, so we could fly the story missions together. In 2015, I hypothesized that the full game state fit in the data segment (only 64k), and I could do small position and orientation experiments with vbindiff to discover how the memory was organized. Some fun findings: the camera was in entity index 0x3D (a "3D" joke?). My brother, Patrick, figured out Borland's overlay loader crashed the game until we made our stub look like a real stack frame. To play you need your own copy (e.g. the GOG version) and you drag setup.exe into the browser. It's a DOSBox mod: no game files are hosted. We reversed the game by hand, but LLMs were used for the recent browser/peer-to-peer WebRTC with voice chat port recently, and we continue to use them for ongoing work. I'll be in the lobby for some hours if anyone wants to fly together.

Discovery history

  1. Show HN

    Oct 19, 2026 · 1 observations

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