Hello my name is Ben Ward for the past 3 years I have been remastering the financial game Wall Street Raider created by Michael Jenkins originally on DOS in 1986.

It has been a rough journey but I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. I just recently redid the website and thought maybe the full story of how this project came to be would interest you all. Thank you for reading.

Congrats on such an achievement. The remake looks great, but those DOS screenshots have an undeniable charm. With such a large scale game, something I always find interesting is uncovering what types of quirks and bugs bubble underneath the surface in the original version. Did you come across anything obvious in your testing?

This is such a well written story, and congratulations Ben, it sounds like it's been a lot of hard but ultimately successful work!

I know you'll deservedly get a lot of credit for all your work in remastering the game, but you should also get credit for how you've woven this narrative together, it's a lovely read. Thank you for taking the time to write it up, and good luck with the Steam release, and whatever project you take on next! :)

If you dropped the source code here you'd probably get a versiojn in each of the 5 major languages quick smart.

Really interesting, thanks for sharing!

I know it almost sounds crass, but you should consider letting an LLM take a crack at transpiling the code. Source to source translations are one of the most widely agreed upon strengths of LLMs.

Regarding "The Second Oldest Game Developer", there are also the authors of "Spacewar!": Steve Russell was born in 1937, meaning, he's either 89 or will be 89 this year. Dan Edwards must be around that age, as well.

Good job! When can I buy it?

I am sold on the game and wishlisted it but lack of release date saddens me.

I love spreadsheet games like Terra Invicta/Paradox/Simutrans and this seems like a terrific example of one.

This is a wonderful project, and the post is a wonderful read!

Are there any plans to break out portions of the Basic engine to a modern language? It's frustrating that the heart of the game remains inscrutable. Surely Ward is tempted?

This is very well written. I have fairly low interest in video games and rarely read gaming content, but read this all the way through. That’s an achievement in itself!

This is amazing! Having no knowledge of Basic, a.) what makes the rewrite "impossible"? b.) how do coding agents perform on the codebase? It might make for a neat benchmark similar to ARC

The Wall Street Raider is under active development, you’re releasing a clone under the same name?

https://www.roninsoft.com/wsraider.htm

Fantastic. Well done! For both the new game and the website article.

I enjoyed the read. How did you tap into the legacy Power Basic engine? Was there a FFI or some kind of bridge you could hook into? And what languages were you using?

... You got the source code, and it was 115 kloc of BASIC, but several other individuals and organizations failed to "reverse-engineer" it?

Awesome story! Well-written also.

You are the engineer we all aspired to be. Though, you really are the chosen one.

Wish you the best!

Love it and fascinated to play the game.

AI can’t do impossible things yet, but we still can.

Cheers for this!

Thank you for sharing your story.

oh this is an absolutely fascinating story!