Show HN: I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stock market sim from 1986

wallstreetraider.com

708 points by benstopics 6 days ago


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.

benstopics - a day ago

Sorry for LLM flavor in the article. It's valid criticism and I will rewrite it when I get the chance. I just wanted to share the story and I didn't have time to write it completely from scratch, plus I'm not that great of a writer. I thought filtering my thoughts through LLM editor would eliminate the distraction of my poor writing abilities, which for most people I think it worked. For others, it created another distraction, ragebait in fact, which was not my iuntention. So between working 80 hours a week at the prompt factory and raising two kids I will find some time to de-ragebaitify the article, although it seems to have unintentionally propelled it to the front page, for which I am admittedly thankful for.

JohnHammersley - 6 days ago

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! :)

dwroberts - a day ago

This was an interesting story, but implying this is some unique insight irked me a little - perhaps because it is LLM-flavoured text that hypes it too much, and makes it sound like some kind of major breakthrough? Keeping the original game as-is, underneath a modern port 'layer', is a pretty popular and common way to update things, you can see it being done in a bunch of modern remasters.

DigiEggz - 2 days ago

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?

jhbadger - 2 days ago

I think it is pretty unreasonable to call CP/M "primitive beyond belief". It was basically equivalent to MS-DOS in capability -- after all, MS-DOS was basically an unlicensed clone of CP/M for the 8086.

w8vY7ER - a day ago

This is my favorite thing I’ve read on Hacker News, ever. Congratulations Ben and Michael, I’m so glad you both had the tenacity to make this happen. Well done.

PaulRobinson - 2 days ago

A technical question for you around the porting being a dead end:

I see from other replies that you now understand the code reasonably well and feel you can expand/extend it while keeping it in BASIC. However, I note you've also done project where you automatically ported Fortran to Lua - are you not interested in trying to do something similar for performance/maintainability reasons? Is there an advantage in keeping it in PowerBASIC?

I've wish listed the game, and look forward to playing it, it sounds like great fun - even the manual sounds like a good read.

deaux - 2 days ago

You can tell that by the end of it you got tired and it's less manually edited and more straight from the LLM's mouth.

I don't really care in this case though, it's an awesome story and it doesn't detract too much. Congratulations!

benstopics - a day ago

As the saying goes, strike while the iron is hot. Wall Street Raider will be released to Early Acces on March 12, 2026. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/3525620/view/5951738...

masswerk - 2 days ago

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.

soci - 2 days ago

Reading between the lines, the game logic itself hasn’t been reverse engineered yet, so adding, changing, or fixing logic still means working with the original code that only Michael Jenkins understands to this day. In any case: massive props to Ben. This feels like a strong foundation, and I’m excited to see him continue evolving the game.

csense - a day ago

You should either bundle the DOS version with the game, or release it separately somewhere. If you broke the DOS frontend and don't want to get it working again, maybe release the last working DOS version?

Consider releasing on GOG. This game is great nostalgia bait, and if you release the DOS version, the GOG staff are quite experienced at building modern, cross-OS installers for DOS games and tuning DOSBox.

FWIW I never played this particular game but around the turn of the millenium I put probably over 100 hours in Trevor Chan's Capitalism games [1].

[1] https://www.gog.com/en/game/capitalism_plus

xp84 - a day ago

Tenuous relevance, but a different stock market game written in BASIC on the Apple II (well, I only had access to the Franklin Ace clone) was my initial motivation at age 10 or so to try programming. It was a pretty thrilling amount of power to a 10-year-old to be able to rename all the companies after my friends or whatever jokes I wanted, and next to alter the rules to get more money. It’s a good thing BASIC was everywhere in the 80s — so many books and computer manuals had enough information that it was easy to find a source to learn the (no pun intended) basics.

leke - a day ago

So what kind of source code can be so difficult to understand?

I've always wanted to get my hands on the Championship Manager 92/93 source code to see what gave it its "soul". What made that version so special.

dwedge - 2 days ago

> The game he wanted to make required something that didn't exist yet: a personal computer.

> So Jenkins waited.

This part made me laugh out loud. It made me imagine Jenkins as a time traveller who had made a mistake and got stuck in the past, but knew that personal computers would be invented.

dwedge - 2 days ago

I admittedly only googled quickly but is there anywhere I can buy the original and the book still? I understand he had issues with the payment processor, and I can see free versions to download but I'd prefer to do it legitimately if possible

rustyhancock - 2 days ago

I'm sure there is truth in original author saying tax code complexity as the core challenge. But that's not what makes this hard. That's domain complexity we all come up against it's accidental complexity that killed the ports.

The real problem is idiosyncratic and esoteric coding practices from a single self-taught accountant working in a language that didn't encourage good structure.

I can translate well-written code without understanding what it does functionally, so long as I understand what it's doing mechanically.

The original author seems to build in the assumption you're not going to translate my code you'll need to rewrite it from the the tax code!

replwoacause - 6 days ago

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?

chewonbananas - a day ago

What a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing! As a mechanical engineer with barely any knowledge or inclination towards coding and/or finance you persuaded me to look into the game.

jjmarr - 6 days ago

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.

saaaaaam - 6 days ago

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!

hexfran - 2 days ago

This story is super interesting and I think can teach us some valuable lessons about refactoring and the price of truly understanding the domain in which the code operates. The accompanying article is also a pleasant reading with a nice bit of background, and I really liked the motivation behind "layering" on top instead of rewriting from scratch.

Thanks for bringing this story to HN!

arjie - 2 days ago

Well that was a pretty cool story. Really enjoyed that it was sufficiently good for its time that so many people got into the field after enjoying playing it (or perhaps that it was enjoyable enough for so many destined for the field to use). And loved the bit where someone emails him and a few chats later off he sends the source code.

tommica - 2 days ago

Really cool article! The solution to wrap the engine in a modern UI was a good one. I would have fallen to the trap of trying to port the whole thing, like all the other companies did.

Out of curiosity, how are the things tested? Or is checking core-engine doing things right only up to the developer and their tribal knowledge?

wewewedxfgdf - 2 days ago

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

linsomniac - a day ago

My "learn options trading" environment, I realized after reading this, really needs a news feed to get a feel for what is happening in the virtual world of the test trading, so I added one today. Still very much playing around with it, the alpha is at https://trading.linsomnaic.com/

doctoboggan - 2 days ago

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.

qubex - 2 days ago

Looks like I’m going to need a Windows 10 virtual machine on my Apple Silicon. Or maybe I’ll just buy my first Windows machine since 2001.

hamdouni - a day ago

Ben, that was one of my favorite "internet" stories... What a beautiful generational link!

tedheath123 - 2 days ago

I loved this game. As soon as I saw the title I knew it would be Wall Street Raider. I play it via dosbox and for me the UI is part of the charm. I’d be interested in tinkering with the pricing simulation but from the article it seems like that’s almost impossible.

vessenes - a day ago

Ben, thanks for working on this! I instantly flashed back to the mid to late 80s when I saw the screenshots; I’m certain I played this game as a pre-teen. Just let us know how we can buy it.

thomassmith65 - 2 days ago

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?

pillefitz - 2 days ago

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

ErneX - 2 days ago

This was a great thing to read this morning, kudos to both!

- a day ago
[deleted]
- 2 days ago
[deleted]
YZF - a day ago

Such fun for you and the author! I've never played the original game but now I wanna!

zahlman - 5 days ago

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

MarcellusDrum - 2 days ago

I read this in it's entirety. Not skimmed through it, but read every single word (took about 30 minutes)

You can imagine my disappointment when in the end, the code is still basically a mystery, and a wrapper around the core game was made.

Not because what you did is not hard or impressive, it's because, up until the line were you said you are going to use a wrapper, you made it seem like you're deciphering the code. That isn't really clickbait, because I had already clicked and spent 20 minutes reading. Being misled felt a bit bad, considering how beautifully the story is written.

Impressive work nonetheless.

- 2 days ago
[deleted]
ozozozd - 4 days ago

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!

cameron_b - 6 days ago

Cheers for this!

Thank you for sharing your story.

msephton - 2 days ago

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

Aditya_Garg - 2 days ago

Amazing read! Is it possible to do something like this but for wall street raider?

https://labs.ramp.com/rct

"claude code plays wall street raider" would be very very cool.

bhy - 2 days ago

The game itself could be a good benchmark for AI agents.

pgt - 2 days ago

"fits of rationality" is a great line.

omega3 - 5 days ago

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

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

nacozarina - 6 days ago

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

praptak - 2 days ago

How does the deal with the original author work with regard to the ownership of the copyright?

I mean, the article means passing the torch but how exactly is this assured in case the author dies and the estate holders don't release the copyright?

pbronez - a day ago

1) this is super interesting

2) the prose is very LLM-flavored, but for once I don’t mind. It’s obvious to me that this blog post only exists because an interesting, intelligent person used an LLM to lower the cost of extracting complex ideas from their brain.

3) the “Fits of Rationality” process sounds a lot like how coding agents work. They’re alive in the moment, then later all they have to work with is the written record of their previous sessions. The Herculean effort to re-implement the result foreshadows the vibe-coding repair industry.

mattbee - a day ago

Congratulations Ben! The game sounds like a dangerous cult that I want no part of. But I've also done game ports recently and was curious - how much of the old codebase did you need to understand (and change!) in order to port it? And how much could you just wrap up / virtualise, and start building on top?

egorfine - 2 days ago

They spent so much time and effort to port this game to... Windows only?...

yieldcrv - a day ago

I haven't heard the lore on this one, why is there interest in this?

SilentM68 - a day ago

Cool! Was looking for something like this all through the 90s :)

sevenseacat - 5 days ago

oh this is an absolutely fascinating story!

Computer0 - 2 days ago

I have been eagerly waiting for this project's release since I first heard about it, thanks for the update!

dionian - 2 days ago

Love it and fascinated to play the game.

TacticalCoder - 14 hours ago

I now work on the "real thing" and that is fascinating to read. I didn't know about Wall Street Raider. Anyone who's ever tried a "paper trading account" on a real brokerage app knows how poor these are: it's near impossible to simulate the real thing without implementing the real thing.

One thing I really don't understand at all is how it's possible to do so much in only 115 kloc. 115 000 lines of code is next to nothing for such a project: there are solo projects with more lines of code than that. It simply ain't that much: how can you simulate mergers, financial derivatives, etc. all in so little lines of code?

It is, simply put, a little codebase. Which makes it all the more impressive.

I mean: it's both a lot (for the time) and nothing for what it does. I'm sure brokerage apps have 10x that amount of code and they only deal with the client side of things. I understand the game doesn't reproduce everything but it still looks incredibly impressive to me to pack so much in so little lines of code. Doubly so if this is sufficient to teach people the basics of finance and trading.

Now something else: this reminds me a bit of a game by the company FTL (created in 1982), who created Dungeon Master. Before that game FTL did "Sundog: The Frozen Legacy". In Sundog they implemented an interpreter for a programming language so that they could write their game (otherwise the default languages available were too limitating) and... You could buy/sell stuff across planets, that you'd transport in your spaceship. They had started writing a complex trading engine for the game: the player was supposed to be able to place buy/sell orders and whatnots but eventually they gave up that part of the game. FWIW when I was playing Sundog The Frozen Legacy I was feeling I was Han Solo in my spaceship: great memories.

Wishing the best to Ben Ward and sending big thanks to Jenkins. These kind of entries are why I'm on HN.

bzmrgonz - a day ago

So, it sounds like you are in a perfect position to tell us whether Epstein's statement is right, THAT WALL STREET "makes trading way more complicated than it needs to be, because of all the money they make"

techsocialism - a day ago

[dead]

NomDePlum - a day ago

[dead]

MUSTANG303 - 2 days ago

[dead]

iberator - 2 days ago

wow, that was pain to read. I was expecting the technical side debugging, instead I get the article about literally nothing FULL of unverifiable claims and lore.

MagicMoonlight - 2 days ago

If you could get an LLM to write the article, why not just get it to rewrite the code?

blobbers - 2 days ago

I feel like this is the sort of thing AI could do in 10 minutes. Did you try?