A 1989 flight sim is being rebuilt from its DOS binaries, and they need pilots who still own the original to find the bugs
A reverse-engineering team has turned every assembly instruction of F-15 Strike Eagle II into compilable C. Now comes the dangerous part: porting it off DOS without introducing bugs - which is why they want testers who can tell a fresh regression from a beloved 37-year-old glitch.
The pipeline: full reverse to assembler, then assembler to byte-identical compiled C, all still on DOS, then the Linux and Windows port begins.
The catch that makes testing hard: it's a bug-for-bug reconstruction, so original quirks like disappearing objects must be preserved, not fixed.
What the project is asking for
A reverse-engineering effort by neuviemeporte is reconstructing MicroProse's 1989 game F-15 Strike Eagle II from its original DOS binaries into C source code. As the call for help explains, the team has finished converting every executable from assembly to C and is preparing to port to modern systems. They want "test pilots" — players who still have the original (version 451.03 with the Desert Storm expansion) — to run the reconstructed build and surface bugs introduced during decompilation. A contributor laid out exactly why the work needs human testers and why it's delicate:
"First step was the full reverse to assembler, second step is to convert the assembler to binary equal compiled C code… then the porting to Linux,Windows will start… Reversing tends to bring in new bugs and its not easy to find all bugs in such old and reversed code" — a commenter explaining the reverse-to-C-to-port pipeline
The subtle part is that not every glitch is a defect. Because it's a bug-for-bug reconstruction, original anomalies — disappearing objects, physics oddities — must be preserved, so a tester has to compare against the real game to know whether something is a regression or a legacy feature.
"Why not just emulate it?"
The obvious objection showed up, and it's a fair one:
"why do people decompile games that can be emulated by DOSbox or the like? Surely a game this old runs absolutely fine on even very low end hardware?" — a commenter raising the emulation objection
The answer is the difference between running a binary and owning the source. DOSBox runs the artifact; decompilation produces something you can read, fix, port natively, and keep alive on hardware that doesn't exist yet. Another voice framed that as a freedom project:
"Communities for these old games do an incredible job securing the four freedoms for their favourite titles, and it's truly inspiring." — a commenter framing the effort as software preservation
Preservation is reverse-engineering plus volunteers
This is what keeping old software alive actually looks like up close: not an emulator wrapper, but a years-long grind of turning machine code back into readable, portable source — and then needing people who held onto a 37-year-old game to confirm the rebuild still misbehaves in all the right ways. The ask is oddly poignant. The project's success depends on finding the handful of people who both kept the original disks and remember its quirks well enough to defend them against a decompiler's well-meaning fixes.
Get breakdowns like this every day
The top Hacker News stories, unpacked — by email, Telegram, or RSS.
Ubisoft co-founder Claude Guillemot died in a plane crash, and the thread turned to an old pilots' proverb
One of the five brothers who built Ubisoft from a Brittany farmhouse into a global studio died flying. The HN thread, short and sober, kept returning to general aviation's grim statistics and an aphorism about the kind of pilots who grow old.