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Show HN: Resurrecting a dead Dune RTS game

metadat
7 replies
18h31m

Great article, wish I could go out for a night on the town with the author, I feel like they're pretty darn fun and intelligent.

The cute expandable explanations are just the bee's knees, and also useful. I felt like I was playing some sort of choose your own adventure RPG just reading TFA, which was a new kind of experience.

--

p.s. re: > CS:GO, which was only retired in 2023

I thought CS:GO was rebranded to CS2. Am I mistaken? (very probably, yes, pretty please enlighten me!)

tslocum
5 replies
18h7m

CS2 is considered by some to be a downgrade compared to CS:GO (yours truly included). I have heard reports of tournament PCs being unable to hold a decent FPS in CS2, whereas they worked great with CS:GO. You can find many user reports sharing similar results, even with higher-end PCs.

Valve wants CS2 to be seen as the continuation of CS:GO, and instead of making a better game to replace it naturally, they forced the change on their playerbase. I, and others, will be bitter about this for some time, as CS:GO is an excellent game.

Insanity
2 replies
16h59m

Their CS2 “server browser” is kinda disgraceful, especially considering that the game was carried for decades on custom maps and mods.

fragmede
1 replies
13h31m

Remember GameSpy? Oh man.

kchr
0 replies
2h49m

Not to mention All-Seeing Eye!

doix
1 replies
7h55m

Complaining about the new CS is tradition. When go came out, people said source was better. When source came out, people said 1.6 was better. They changed bunny hopping and AWP quick scoping somewhere around 1.3-1.5 and people said the previous version was better.

Although I guess in this case they _forced_ people to change, which sucks. Let the niche communities keep playing the version they like. I guess it's because it's a live service game and they need to keep selling their loot boxes.

Sesse__
0 replies
4h56m

And I do vividly recall someone saying that the later CS betas had lag-compensating things that were unfair, and invited others to play beta 1, “where you actually hit what you aim at”!

Dylan16807
0 replies
17h1m

CS2 was uploaded under the same application ID as CS:GO, but they remade the entire thing in a new engine. It is not a rebrand.

lmz
4 replies
18h58m

I wonder if they can use manifests / registration-free COM to avoid the registry dependency of the online component.

wheybags
3 replies
18h54m

I did come across some mentions of that, but it sounded like you would need to configure it at build time. If you know of a way to do it with a pre-existing binary that wasn't designed with that in mind I'd be very interested.

cshokie
0 replies
15h29m

I came here to also post about regfree COM. If you can get it to work that seems like the ideal solution.

See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/sbscs/creati...

“Activation contexts enable COM objects to be used without requiring that they be registered.”

smcin
3 replies
20h4m

'Emperor: Battle for Dune', a 2001 RTS game by Westwood Studios, essentially a Dune-themed 'Command & Conquer'.

Play as one of the three main factions: House Atreides, Harkonnen, or the (non-canon) Ordos.

https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Emperor:_Battle_for_Dune

romanhn
2 replies
17h57m

The original C&C was in fact based on Dune II, the OG RTS game that came out in 1992. The cutscenes from Dune II are still burned into my memory, what a great game it was.

nick__m
0 replies
13h37m

Dune II was so great for a 11yo !

elric
0 replies
2h52m

"The planet Arrakis, known as Dune. Land of sand. Home of the spice melange. The spice controls the empire. Whoever controls Dune controls the spice. The emperor has proposed a challenge to each of the houses. The house that produces the most spice will control Dune. There are no set territories and no rules of engagement. Vast armies have arrived. Now three houses fight for control of Dune. The noble Atreides. The insidious Ordos. And the evil Harkonnen. Only one house will prevail. Your battle for Dune begins now..."

Just thinking about the soundtrack to that most excellent game gives me goosebumps. Fond memories there.

metadat
2 replies
1h49m

Since it's now abandonware, you can download Emperor: Battle for Dune from archive.org directly or via torrent:

https://archive.org/details/EmperorBattleForDuneUSAEurope

(For others who, like me, want to try this game out with the wheybags patch :)

Just for fun, I also dug up the past pirate releases:

  releaseName                                              TYPE      releaseDate
  -------------------------------------------------------  --------  -------------------
  Emperor_Battle_for_Dune_v1_06_Update-RAZoRDOX            GAMES     2001-06-21 00:00:00
  Emperor.Battle.for.Dune.Update.v1.07.Cracked-MYTH        DOX       2001-06-30 16:16:43
  Emperor.Battle.for.Dune.All.Level.Saves-EyM              0DAY      2001-07-10 12:07:49
  Emperor.Battle.for.Dune.Update.v1.08.Cracked-MYTH        DOX       2001-08-17 08:17:39
  Emperor.Battle.For.Dune.Update.v1.09.Cracked-MYTH        DOX       2001-10-06 06:04:21
  Emperor.Battle.for.Dune.Update.v1.06.Cracked-MYTH        DOX       2003-07-11 22:33:37
  Emperor-Battle_For_Dune-NORDiC-DOX-RUSDOX                DOX       2003-07-11 22:33:45
  Emperor.Battle.For.Dune.Poradnik.POLiSH.PDF.eBook-KiOSK  BOOKWARE  2006-03-10 01:48:50
  Emperor.Battle.For.Dune.Money.Trainer-FLTDOX             DOX       2006-10-10 21:52:25
  Emperor.Battle.for.Dune.v1.06.Update-RAZoRDOX            0DAY      2006-10-10 21:52:30
  Emperor_Battle_For_Dune_Money_Trainer-FLTDOX             DOX       2006-10-10 21:52:30
  Emperor.Battle.for.Dune-DEVIANCE                         GAMES     2007-02-15 17:25:00
  OST-Emperor_-_Battle_For_Dune-CD-2001-DGN                MP3       2010-09-01 22:45:42
I was surprised to see there is even an OST soundtrack! Amusing.

slavik81
0 replies
19m

When I think of Emperor: Battle for Dune, I hear "Ride the Worm" in my head. The music really sells the majesty of the armies battling in feudal war across a dangerous desert filled with behemoth creatures that could devour them all. https://youtu.be/czXaKxcQNkQ

bigstrat2003
0 replies
13h0m

It's pretty good, too!

8372049
0 replies
8h7m

Calling it an RTS is a stretch. It's more of a 4X game. It has a low pace and combat isn't particularly important.

Sesse__
2 replies
8h33m

Very nice post! I did something related to this a decade back, except it was for Tiberian Sun and to patch its networking code. Jumping into other people's code like this is like having a shared connection in a sense. I noticed to my horror that there was a completely separate stack for modem play; it wasn't like they just sent TCP/IP over the modem or something. Some poor soul must have spent months of their life writing all this custom code for framing and syncing and error handling (what happens if the connection goes down and you have to re-dial, etc.?). Which was irrelevant almost already when the game originally came out.

bikson
1 replies
7h28m

I think that was for another reason. IMO sole purpose was calling t the another modem not connecting to the internet via dial up. I never use this but a lot ofbold games Has those option.

Sesse__
0 replies
7h16m

Yes, obviously. Direct dial-up plus local serial cable.

tonfreed
1 replies
17h21m

The soundtrack he links to reminds me of a game from the 90s called 7th Legion. It was average at best, but the music was killer

Klaster_1
0 replies
13h46m

Totally agree. Back in those days, I played the game for a couple of hours at best, but the soundtrack has stayed in my music library for decades, what a masterpiece!

hyperman1
1 replies
1h58m

I see this kind of note regularly in blog posts:

  This is probably a good time to mention that I am not a skilled reverse engineer.
Nope. You've walked the walk, you've earned the right to talk the talk. We're all building experience as we go.

You're now at least a junior reverse engineer, and seeing the size of this project, you can even drop the junior as far as I'm concerned. Enjoy!

inetknght
0 replies
1h12m

IMHO the difference between "skilled" or not is whether you know where to look for help without causing more problems, and even more importantly: when to look for help. Documentation might be all the help you need, and reading documentation definitely makes you skilled, but plenty of people don't know how to search for it!

herodoturtle
1 replies
5h27m

It's got a 28.8 BPS modem

Active matrix, man. A million psychedelic colors.

42lux
0 replies
5h18m

RISC architecture is going to change everything.

grafelic
1 replies
19h50m

Very interesting and in depth article. I really appreciate the amount of detail and knowledge shared about how to go about reverse enginnering and patching abandonware like this. Thank you. Saw the game in a local thrift store, but left it be, since I only played Dune II rts. I will pick it up for sure now.

brightball
0 replies
14h51m

I wonder if it would run under Wine?

cmcaleer
1 replies
9h24m

This game actually holds a ton of significance for the RTS genre as a whole. A very typical view of the RTS genre is that you have peasants who harvest resources that you gave to protect, and the Dune RTS was a real progenitor in this.

But it was only like that because of the book. Were it not like that, maybe RTS as a genre would have gone down a different path. Maybe it's inevitable that it would have eventually gone down the path that it took eventually, but there's a good chance that it would have been unrecognisable. Maybe you'd have gotten resources by just harvesting your base's resources instead so opponents would have harassed you by harassing your buildings instead. Maybe there would have been different bonuses for map control other than better access to resources.

RichardLake
0 replies
8h53m

To be clear the article isn't about Dune 2; it is about Emperor: Battle for Dune.

TechDebtDevin
1 replies
12h13m

Damn, what if we don't have any access to a physical copy of the game?

lewispollard
0 replies
8h34m

There's a certain organisation on the internet where certain things are archived.

personjerry
0 replies
14h37m

Any chance to port this to mac? :)

lowbloodsugar
0 replies
18h10m

Hats off. Amazing effort. Great read. I haven’t used IDA on a game in a long while and this is next level effort. Bravo.

le-mark
0 replies
6h48m

UI design is my passion.

So great, I really miss writing like this. Reminds me of Steve Yegge blog posts, among others.

inetknght
0 replies
1h5m

Hey this is nice! This comment stuck out to me:

Westwood Online (WOL) doesn't work anymore, so you can't play multiplayer except through LAN

I loved Command & Conquer in my younger years and I know a small bit about Westwood Online from the client side.

If I recall XWIS.net did a lot of support after WOL went offline! It might be worth the author reaching out to the niche developer community there, although I think it's truly dying out. If I recall, the work that XWIS guys did ended up getting recognition from EA and they did a lot of help to continue WOL support for C&C Renegade.

There's also FreeRA project that is the direct ancestor of several of the recent re-releases of C&C on eg Steam. They might also be able to help get WOL working.

I say this because WOL was pushed as its own library, and so a replacement of the library will probably be fairly easy compared to (re-)reverse-engineering the WOL stack.

Edit:

Oh, as I continue reading the post, it goes on to discuss how the WOL component is also fixed. Extra nice!

evanjrowley
0 replies
13h21m

I loved this game very much. Best soundtrack of any Westwood Studios game. So glad it's still playable.

binary132
0 replies
18h25m

I am really stoked about this actually, I thought it could not happen

bbor
0 replies
19h24m

This is the most amazing things I’ve seen in ages, very exciting!! I’m very far from the technical work here, but I appreciate how approachable you made it. Can’t wait to try it when I get home!

Log_out_
0 replies
2h11m

The idea that modern add-HD riddled and pay to win shovelware gets defeated by old classics is deeply entertaining to me. Just one hacker helping.. and the audience would drive the crapware out of town on a rail. Almost like good things of the past in an eternal medium will always outcompete mediocre things of the present.

Kerbiter
0 replies
10h31m

That's a great writeup and a great effort! Perhaps we could integrate with your efforts at CnCNet somehow. Come hang out with us on CnCNet :)