Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server

> I worked on this project intermittently for 10 years, until recent developments in LLMs finally made it possible to complete this seemingly never-ending task.

I've been working on my own MFC C++ decompilation project. It's insane how useful LLMs are for this.

The UO emulator scene got me into network programming. I've never seen an online game capture so many ancillary/emergent/accidental gameplay mechanics as well as this, somehow all the 3d MMOs seemed to downgrade a lot of the interesting economics, building, exploring that UO delivered. PvP and quest type stuff is probably a lot better in other games but it was still compelling and you could realistically play solo or in a group or casually interact with randoms and effortlessly switch between these as you felt like it.

Memories.

I played T2A a little last year, great shard & peeps running it.

https://www.uosecondage.com/

Posts like this are a great reminder that protocol archaeology is half software history, half debugging. The reconstruction work here sounds genuinely fun.