DOS Game "F-15 Strike Eagle II" reversing project needs DOS test pilots

https://neuviemeporte.github.io/f15-se2/2026/06/20/needyou.html

by LowLevelMahn • 1 month ago

284 74 1 month ago

neuviemeporte.github.io

Playable DOS version available

First step was the full reverse to assembler, second step is to convert the assembler to binary equal compiled C code, all this still on DOS until no assembler code is left, then the porting to Linux,Windows will start

Reversing tends to bring in new bugs and its not easy to find all bugs in such old and reversed code - but so far everything seems to work

try finding open bugs if you got version 451.03 of F-15 around combined with Dosbox or a real DOS

find latest DOS release here: https://github.com/neuviemeporte/f15se2-re/releases

the f15_se2-*.zip file contains the replacement executables for the DOS game

The airforce needs YOU!

yepyoukno• 1 month ago

Nice work!

I’m not sure you should beat yourself up too much for a Linix* port, emulators are so well supported and ubiquitous, if it works there (not everything does), call it a win!

I use Lutris (https://lutris.net/) for its ease of use.

I can see your a “low level mahn” and this may be more of a quest for you than playing a cool retro game.

Any which way, GREAT WORK!!!!

LowLevelMahn4• 1 month ago

its mostly the combined work of AJenbo, neuviemeporte and others - my part is very small, fixing some compilation problems with newer compilers and spreading the news

C source needs to get compiled on every platform reachable - that is a must :)

skerit4• 1 month ago

I'm currently reverse engineering a few games too. It's quite easy with AI now. But I'm worried about the legality of it all. Any thoughts on this?

habagav2• 1 month ago

You could do “clean room engineering” approach where the reversing agent generates a specification from its findings, and then have a separate agent reimplement the code without seeing the original binaries/code.

You’d just have to make sure the specification doesn’t include actual source snippets (the AI will try this if you don’t specify). Pseudo code would be sufficient I guess where necessary.

rhplus• 1 month ago

Images, music, video, and text would all be under copyright, while characters and logos may be registered trademarks.

xp842• 1 month ago

Somehow I’m not that concerned. I haven’t heard of any company but Nintendo trying to assert rights to 1980s game IP, and that’s because they’re still selling those literal ROMs as part of a subscription service.

Would I port such a game and then sell it? No, because that kind of puts a target on your back. Keeping it open source and also noncommercial, I don’t think it’s ever gonna matter.

(Obligatory I’m not a lawyer disclaimer - this is a vibes based comment not legal advice. Obviously copyright is nearly infinite, in theory)

unixhero• 1 month ago

Many of the games have bo copyright owners any longer. They are literally abandoned.

qmr2• 1 month ago

Worry about it when you get a C&D.

snerbles3• 1 month ago

USAF veteran here. I grew up on F-15 Strike Eagle II, and unfortunately my copy has long since degraded. I am elated to see this project.

I do have one teeny, tiny, personal pedantic grumble that is sure to bring other the branches out of the woodwork to point out how much I love chairs.

Air Force. Two words. Thanks.

ixp_ninja4• 1 month ago

Fixed (might need a Shift-Ctrl-R reload). Apologies, English is not my first language.

bluedino• 29 days ago

Dumb question, but if parts of the game are written in asm, can you create C code that produces a binary equivalent when compiled?

LowLevelMahn4• 29 days ago

no thats nearly impossible

mikerg87• 1 month ago

I posted this to twosopbts.com so that one more retro gaming community will know of the call

cf100clunk• 1 month ago

twosopbts.com

I'm not getting DNS NX results.

slater• 1 month ago

https://twostopbits.com/item?id=9081

Waterluvian• 1 month ago

Does AI fit well in trying to reason about the structure of a decompiled project when you lack symbol names?

This isn’t my wheelhouse but I was surprised just how well AI could figure out the intent of the structure of some JavaScript where I had no source maps.

AJenbo• 1 month ago

Yes it's very helpful

kriztw• 1 month ago

AI is superhuman at reading and understanding assembly, it doesn't care much about if it's decompiled or has symbols, that just makes it a bit slower. In some cases it can even understand heavily obfuscated control flow directly without using tools.

louwrentius• 1 month ago

I've played this game so much on a Laser (Dutch computer brand) 286 with VGA monochrome screen, in the early '90s.

imrehg• 1 month ago

Oh, this was one that I played a lot as a kid! (Alongside F-19 Stealth Fighter, F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter - the two that apparently came before and after this game - TIL, and to a lesser extent F-14 Tomcat)

I think, this needs the original game files to run, if I read things correctly. So probably just gonna read the dev journals, rather than fly this particular bird again...

sourcegrift• 1 month ago

Aren't these names trademarked? I can imagine lockheed selling the rights for a side income lol

swiftcoder• 1 month ago

Same as for any game that uses real car brands or gun manufacturers, quite a few of these companies are willing to license for certain types of game

tecleandor2• 1 month ago

The F-19 denomination was never used, they skipped from F-18 to F-20. The game was based on what they believed that the stealth fighter (F-117) was going to be before it was publicly acknowledged. So maybe it wasn't trademarked. (Or maybe they trademarked everything just in case...)

Vaguely similar to the F-29 Retaliator game, that was based in the X-29 experimental fighter, but not in an existing F-29 of any kind.

alberto-m2• 1 month ago

The dev blog is one of the best retro-reversing journals you can find. Happy reading!

raddan2• 1 month ago

F-19 is a great game and one of my favorite Sid Meier titles ever. I remember buying it from Electronics Boutique in the late 1980s and playing it on our Packard Bell 286. The game's copy protection mechanism required you to look up aircraft in the manual and identify them. The consequence was that I memorized the entire set of aircraft in the game. I even bought a Gravis Analog joystick to play the game and I still have the keyboard overlay.

I would love a modern reboot of this game...

EdwardDiego4• 1 month ago

I can still remember the intro music for F-19 as played through the built-in PC speaker, the harsh tinniness just made it more of a banger.

And yep, that copy protection is why I can tell my Floggers from my Backfires at the limits of FLIR range lol.

EdwardDiego4• 1 month ago

Was this the one that you could play co-op with a friend in a front seat / back seat role? Or was it III? I spent so long ringing my friend on the landline to help set up his modem configuration,then having him dial in again, starting the game, him disconnecting again, me ringing him to see what had happened that time etc. etc. When we finally got it working, we played it so incessantly that his Mum banned him from playing it over the modem as we were tying up the sole phone line for hours.

I would love to find similar multiplayer in other flight sims, or space sims. I also really want to get this game working again and see if I can nostalgia bait my friend.

smrtinsert• 1 month ago

Man I loved this game. My friend and I would split responsibility and share the keyboard. One did the firing other the navigating

EdwardDiego4• 1 month ago

A friend and I did this with Privateer II (the one with incessant FMV starring a young Clive Owen) - pilot on the gamepad, navigator / weapons officer on the keyboard.

bigmattystyles• 1 month ago

If it's the game I'm thinking of, floppy copies were going around my middle school in France at the time but this was a game that without the manual, good luck even getting the plane off the ground. I seem to recall a mode where you started out in the air. Fun times.

tecleandor2• 1 month ago

That happened to me, at least, with F-29 Retaliator. Your best bet was starting a mission already in the air, as the game (IIRC) didn't include any tutorials.

rzzzt2• 1 month ago

The mission scenario descriptions were circulating both as a text file and in the hint section of a computer magazine we had, but I didn't get either for a long time. "Zulu alert" mode lets you take as many enemies off the sky as you can, with infinite ammo.

Edit: I now remember that the first training mission is something like "shoot two target practice boards in sector E5". You have to be very meticulous to find those just by flying around!

raddan2• 1 month ago

You definitely needed the manual. But an 8-year old version of me mastered the game so it couldn't have been that hard.

FWIW, the manual is a masterpiece. I really miss all the ancillaries that came with early computer games.

EdwardDiego4• 1 month ago

That reminds me of when a friend convinced me to try to get into Falcon BMS. The community has created thousands of pages of documentation on flying the Falcon, operating the various weapon systems, as well as things like energy management, formation flying techniques etc. etc.

https://wiki.falcon-bms.com/en/manuals

It's really impressive, but I did not have the time to put into learning it.

shdh• 1 month ago

I never played this, but I did play Janes F/A-18, was a great game

peregrinus_13• 1 month ago

Oi! And Jane's USAF!

MajorTakeaway• 1 month ago

I played US Navy Fighters and that reminded me of this game, shortly after playing it for a year I had received Jane's F-16 as a 13th birthday present.

gmerc3• 1 month ago

It’s ridiculously easy to port games now.

https://robin.tooclever.org took less than a day in API time

npunt• 1 month ago

This is cool! Is there an index of these ported games / OSS ports?

ixp_ninja4• 1 month ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_video_games...

gmerc3• 30 days ago

Occasionally added to https://this.os.isfine.org

howard941• 1 month ago

Many hours expended on building up doppler maps in flight to use to shoot SLAMs with. An excellent sim along with Digital Integrations' Tornado which really needs a reboot.

holoduke• 1 month ago

Is this game similar to retaliator?

rasz• 1 month ago

Afaik Retaliator is more arcade.

taffydavid2• 1 month ago

Noob question. I really hope this doesn't come across as negativity.

I love that people spend time on making old games work, but why do people decompile games that can be emulated by DOSbox or the like? Surely a game this old runs absolutely fine on even very low end hardware?

snerbles3• 1 month ago

A lot of floppy-based games have on-disk copy protection patterns that take advantage of undocumented behavior of disk drives at the time. So much so that tools like Greaseweazle [0] are necessary to compose full magnetic flux maps of archived floppies.

Another thing is that these games are often made to run on a wide variety of graphics and sound hardware, and effectively have drivers compiled into them.

[0] https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle

ixp_ninja4• 1 month ago

It's not about running the game, it's about having it open for modification. Patching a game in binary form is ridiculously hard, anything than simple bugfixes is mostly a no-go. With the source code available we can add entire features, port it to Windows 10, implement 4K HDR, textures, new models, new missions... the sky's the limit. Additionally, it's really hard to analyze the game from assembly opcodes with hardcoded data offsets. With C code either we can read what it does directly, or add instrumentation or debugging code to it to figure it out.

skywal_l• 1 month ago

And personally, I prefer doing ./game, rather than having to install a bunch of stuff and see my system cluttered by hidden folders.

taffydavid2• 1 month ago

Ok but - and again I'm trying not to be negative, simply trying to understand - if you want a flight sim that works on Windows 10 and supports 4k HDR, wouldn't it be a lot easier to just build it from scratch, rather than trying to decompile a game from 1989 that came on 5¼ inch floppies? I mean, even if someone just _gave_ you the source code of the 1989 game it would be more work to port it to Windows or as a feature than it would be to just build your own 90s era air combat game in c++ without any baggage.

Is it simply about squeezing more out of a classic game we love?

khedoros1• 1 month ago

I had a few reasons, when I tried tackling RE of a DOS-era game a number of years ago. I wanted to document the file formats, look through the data and find unused media, identify and fix some of the more egregious bugs in the game, build modding tools for it, understand the techniques used to build something that was memorable from my childhood, reduce the friction of running it on a modern system, make available optional improvements like higher resolution, texture replacement, and so on.

It ended up being more than I had the patience to finish. It might be doable for me now.

coolwulf• 1 month ago

This story is now on Youtube: https://youtu.be/aIPKkOpIiF8

shdon• 1 month ago

Cool video, though the AI voiceover is jarring.

_jackdk_• 1 month ago

Communities for these old games do an incredible job securing the four freedoms for their favourite titles, and it's truly inspiring. Great work.

CalChris• 1 month ago

I have a friend who flew F15s. I’ve sent him this.

DOS Game "F-15 Strike Eagle II" reversing project needs DOS test pilots

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