Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990

▲ Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990(vogons.org)

93 points by LowLevelMahn 4 days ago | 22 comments

▲ shevy-java 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It was a pretty cool game. Not as good as e. g. civilisation but nonetheless fun. I even managed to make profits with my railroads.

Young folks can use dosbox etc... but it just does not feel the same compared to how it was "originally". I could not get myself to want to play raildroad tycoon again; I found it easy to play games such as civilization or UFO: Enemy Unknown (oddly enough the first part is more playable than the second part here).

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suprjami 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

OpenXcom adds a whole heap of wonderful conveniences to UFO/X-Com. It's probably my favourite open source game engine clone thing.

https://openxcom.org/

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stoneforger 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Of the games you mention it's civilization that's kind of hard to replay for me. RR tycoon had fewer, worse, iterations. All Xcom games are super replayable with the exception of Xcom 3. Colonization is super replayable and it's only reiteration based on Civ 4 is not worth it.

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spockz 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

To this day I’ve managed to win in every civ game but still have to figure out how to consistently beat Colonisation.

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fakedang 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

XCOM 3?

	▲	CyMonk 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The third game in the series is "X-COM: Apocalypse". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XCOM

▲ simonebrunozzi 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I loved this game so much. There was a "deluxe" version with small improvements.

I would love to play a modern version of this. Probably true for other strategy classics like Master of Magic, Master of Orion 2, Colonization.

Edit: ha, I remember that I used a really good tactic of playing with competitors' stocks, gaining majority, siphoning tons of money from them, and then selling the stocks. More profitable than running actual railroads.

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spockz 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I have been hooked on Transport Fever for a while now. My only gripe with it is that civilian vehicles will take roads intended for cargo/public transport traffic only. So the most profitable way is to disconnect entire cities by road and then use rail or road with disjunct depots to connect cargo to cities. This way you can force civilians to use public transport.

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flohofwoe 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I would love to play a modern version of this.

Steam and GoG have a version of Railroad Tycoon 2 which works well on modern machines:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/7620/Railroad_Tycoon_II_P...

https://www.gog.com/en/game/railroad_tycoon_2

Not quite as old-school as the first version, but IMHO gameplay-wise "just right".

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boxed 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

https://www.openttd.org/ ?

	▲	Neil44 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I've been playing for the last year or two. Great game.
	▲	Krutonium 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		https://openloco.io/ too! Chris Sawyer made a lot of games that have since been reverse engineered lmao.

▲ p0w3n3d an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Congratulations, that's something really good!

▲ marticode 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I spent countless hours as a teen on that game. I feel it might be faster to rewrite it from scratch though than reverse engineer it.

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jaggederest 6 hours ago | parent [-]

It's trickier than you think! Even for the modern era, the railroad tycoon games are surprisingly deep and sophisticated economic simulations. I still haven't found one to equal Railroad Tycoon 3, which has this kind of neat reactive diffusion field pricing engine.

The modern equivalents (I'm thinking of Transport Fever 2) while they are fun games just lacks the ability to build and manipulate a real economy by doing things like e.g. putting an industry in a town and then transporting goods there to satisfy the industry, making both your train line and the industry wildly profitable.

	▲	p0w3n3d an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I really admired Transport Tycoon which had those 3 additionals transport channels. Have you tried it? I love the shuttle buses which you can use to connect to an external (to the city) airport, railroad track that can go throughout the whole map, and the ships that transport mostly oil for fun and profit...
	▲	nikitau 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There's also a whole, albeit niche, board game genera of so called 18xx game (eg. 1889 Shikoku) that deal with the economic aspects of 19th century railroads. Usually dry as sand, but some of the heaviest games out there in terms of complexity.

▲ jrs235 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Loved that game. And Sid Meier's Colonization.

	▲	p0w3n3d an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		`Not a penny for those heretic swines! No taxation without representation!` and `Wery well, we shall withdraw our forces!` I was really disappointed when the both the remake and the open source versions lost those memorable quotes.
	▲	rc_kas 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah so much fuzzy good memories of it. Now I want to play that game again.

▲ pimlottc 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The image links seem to all be broken but you can see some high-res maps in the video starting around 1m10s

▲ LowLevelMahn 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

the developer 'Wilczek' is posting the progress on his Railroad Tycoon reversing in this Vogons-Thread