Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990
vogons.org60 points by LowLevelMahn 4 days ago
60 points by LowLevelMahn 4 days ago
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).
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.
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.
Loved that game. And Sid Meier's Colonization.
The image links seem to all be broken but you can see some high-res maps in the video starting around 1m10s
the developer 'Wilczek' is posting the progress on his Railroad Tycoon reversing in this Vogons-Thread
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