High-fidelity playable
Chaos Overlords: New Chrome
Chaos Overlords, 1996 · Stick Man Games
A rewrite of the 1996 turn-based gang-war strategy game, playable start to finish on Windows, Linux and macOS.
Old games do not have to go extinct
Refurbished Dinosaurs rebuilds lesser-known PC games from 1990 to 2004 so they run natively on machines that did not exist when they shipped, with no emulator or compatibility wrapper around the original.
See what is playableAccuracy you can check
Each game has a public spec that writes down what the original does, rule by rule and file format by file format, with the addresses and experiments behind every finding. A parity matrix next to it says which rules the rebuild matches. You can hold our code against the spec and your own copy of the game, or use the spec to write an engine of your own.
Better than you remember it
We fix the original’s crashes and bugs, and add conveniences such as tooltips and running at a fixed speed instead of as fast as the machine allows. Anything that changes the balance, or that some players would want the old way, sits behind a setting that starts off. Every departure from the original is logged in the repository with the reason for it.
Clean room, from observation
None of the original code is reused. We study what the executable does, write it down in our own words, and write the code from those notes alone, so a restoration is a new program rather than a recompilation or a port. We ship no original art, audio or data either: each restoration imports them from a copy you own, usually the GOG release.
The herd
What is playable today and what is being dug out next.
Limited-fidelity playable
Conqueror A.D. 1086
Conqueror A.D. 1086, 1995 · Software Sorcery
Norman England as a fief-management game with real-time battles and first-person jousting. The whole campaign can be played in the rebuild, which does not yet follow the original rule for rule.
Early prototype
Dark Sun: Shattered Lands & Wake of the Ravager
Dark Sun: Shattered Lands / Wake of the Ravager, 1993 · Strategic Simulations, Inc.
SSI's Athas duology, with its Gladiators, Psionicists and famously hostile desert. Work has started on Wake of the Ravager, which is not playable yet.
From the workshop
Notes on file formats, rule reconstruction and the odd bug hunt.
Introducing Refurbished Dinosaurs
As far back as I can remember, I was always fascinated by the games I couldn’t play. During my school years, I was a bookworm, and spent a great deal more time reading about games than actually playing them, as my eyesight was poor, and videogame magazines were much more readily available than the videogames themselves.
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