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I love that this channel doesn't shy away from the fact that reverse engineering consists mainly of the emotion of being face down on your desk for hours while nothing works - the unglamorous truth!

Well I'll be danged, this was my baby. I ported this from the Windows version, and it was one of the very first Windows 95 games ever published. What a fun blast from the past, I'm glad it popped up in my feed. It was interesting to see that you initially had palette problems, as those bedeviled me because the way the palette mapping was handled between WinG (which the Windows version used) and CreateDIBSection was slightly different. I don't remember all the details, but it took me weeks to get it right and not fall in to "pink mode" during various states (that's what you were seeing before you set the correct bitmap path.) Not sure what was up with the save game code, that came directly from the Windows version with no modification that I recall, so I don't take responsibility :D

Have you released this patch anywhere? I’m sure many people would appreciate the work you did.

honestly after the GRAPHICS folder registry thing, I was feeling there was going to be a running theme of everything being registry failures. So your save/load problem I was sure was going to be it loading a NULL path for the directory it would save to/load from. Fascinating dive as usual 👍

When a programmer approaches a problem instead of an IT engineer, the solution is sometimes completely different. I’m an IT professional and it’s really fascinating how you approach this. I’d be messing with virtualization or compatibility layers instead, myself.

I would spend good money if you made a tutorial series on how to use each of these tools, general techniques of the trade, etc. This is a fantastic series and I’ve tried looking into this problem myself but didn’t get anywhere near what you’ve accomplished here because the tools are very intimidating

That's a lot of effort using the nuclear option. If memory serves; Sim City 2000 uses Install Shield for its installer. Install Shield was 16 bit; because then you could use the same installer to package your files for 16-bit or 32-bit applications. It'd work for everything from Windows 3.1 to XP. All you'd need to do is use a 32bit or 64bit replacement for the 16bit Install Shield to get the game installed properly. In Windows 10, I don't need any compatibility settings enabled for it to run perfectly.

Correction: 16bit windows execuables are supported (ish) in any 32-but Windows version, but not 64-bit. This includes Windows 10 32bit. Only the OS/2 subset support concluded with Win2000.

This was my favorite of your low level videos so far, which is a high bar to clear because I thought the others were great too. Thanks for explaining all the Win32 Syscalls - basically all my programming has done on posix compliant OSes so I would be completely lost without you explaining all of them.

From 6:16, I immediately knew the culprit was the Windows File Dialog system. It was obvious; when you save or load, what do you EXPECT to see, as a user? A file dialog! In this case it seems like there is another missing registry entry to specify the default save game folder, which was silently failing and causing the file dialog callback to be undefined. Note that your dialog box opened in the default "Desktop" folder, which didn't exist in Windows 95.

Thank you for this! I really appreciate your patient explanation style and the way you take us through your thought process. Including the paths you explored that _didn’t_ work is equally educational as the successes and really important for showing people how to persevere.

If something can't be bought it should be public domain. No matter their 30 years of rights. It should be immediately be voided if they do not sell something they started selling for over a year.

For some reason I felt like subscribing to your channel at around the 4 minuet mark... 🤔

another BANGER. So much can be learned with these videos.

I must confess, the final part with the file handler went a bit over my head, but this is a great learning resource for how to look 'inside' programs. Thank you!

Would it have been easier to debug along with a Windows 98 VM? The tools would be older but I assume the game would have ran properly and hit those variables you were looking for. This was awesome to watch. I wish I had this talent.

After watching this, I tested it out in WINE. Both the Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 versions install fine, though they complain about a lack of 256-colour support, and the music doesn't work, but they otherwise work. DOS version in DOSBox works perfectly.

There is an option of running DOSBox with Windows 3.1 or 95 so you can mount a CD virtually for 16-bit support. I've done this for several of my older computer games.

Your work here is extremely important for game preservation

how nice, i feel like in 1996, hanging out with the CS students at the computer store :-) and it's so relaxing to listen to you. i know how all the "looking at this, we can see..." included some searching, but it's so calming to always just hear the successful end result. i'll keep that in mind for my own work!

I freaking love this content! It's getting old games to work and showing your detective process of how to debug through getting them to work. Can I get any better! Thank you so much keep it coming! Please!

People like you are absolutely vital to the community - you invest your time to make titles we once loved playable again, and you get no compensation except for the joy of making it work. Being abe to step thru ASM in a decompiler & debugger is a very keen skill. From COUNTLESS people, THANK YOU, from the bottom of our hearts!

Dude, that was a super intuitive explanation. Always down to see old game patching videos.

I love these videos you make they're to the point and give SO much info

A heads up: Windows has never made it easier to have CDs without having a CD drive. In a lot of cases, it has first-class support for simply mounting the disk image (eg. .iso) directly. In some really picky cases, you can use Daemon Tools that entirely emulates there being a CD drive with a CD in it.

Very nice, I hadn't realized that the DOS release on GOG was an inferior version and that there was a native Windows one… One thing, you said the NE format was only supported until Win2000. I think it was actually supported on all 32-bit Windows versions, up to Windows 10. It's when you go 64-bit that you have a problem, because Microsoft didn't want the bother of supporting 16-bit code on a 64-bit kernel (even though it's technically possible and Linux does it with a few kludges).

I been following for 2 about two months, but you keep bringing more to the table. :) great video.

This is so cool to watch and learn! I hope you continue doing this kind of in depth analysis and fixing of games/programs! Cheers

Great vid. I have a feeling that Raymond Chen mentioned this bug in an old blog. As he worked on the Win 95 compatibility team he fixed up little things like this. I bet there was a patch in win 95 that fixed it.

I am an amateur programmer at best, but damn I love this content so much. Something about it just hits all the right dopamine receptors.

I just watch the whole video and I loved it! Expecially since SimCity 2000 was something both me and my step-dad used to play. I would suggest though adding a soft non-copyrighted track to videos like this. It helps a lot in elevating the content and makes it more pleasant to watch, expecially since everything else is fantastic

Thanks for showing and explaining the reverse engineering process, including the tools you use, and the conclusions you make along the way. I've always been curious about it, and witnessing your process and what you're able to do with the tools, it's enlightening and inspiring for this C++ game programmer. I look forward to learning more on your channel. I've subscribed. Thank you!

Very interesting. But did you ever consider spinning up a Windows 2000 VM to install and run the game and capturing data from there? I feel like that would've taken a lot of struggle and guesswork out of the process of getting it working in Windows 11.

These videos are very cool, thanks for all the time and effort these must take dude :)

This is an insane level of detailed spelunking, but also presented in an entertaining and informative way. Bravo!

I still have Simcity 2000 on an old Acer Acerpower DX4 that I bought new way back in 1996 but I haven't played it in years. Maybe 20 years. Oof. Your video brought back some good memories!

Last year I was playing Sim City 2000 a bunch, and got a Windows version mostly working (animations would often freeze, though). I forget the whole process. But I found, interestingly enough, that the DOS version "felt" a little better to play. Something about the UI in the DOS version felt better to me even though I'd never played that as a kid.

Preservation of old games is becoming a harder and harder issue as we move forward.

This is really awesome! I look forward to when I can come back to this and understand everything that's been explained 👍

best videos on youtube for me currently. you do amazing job.

nice video. Old games I personally like to run on Linux. much higher success rate compared to try and make windows listen to what the user wants xD but the fact you fix it yourself is just awesome

Brings me back to trying to play the DOS version, but I couldn't because I couldn't get enough free low ram with the cd driver installed. It ran great in OS/2 as I could give it more low ram than DOS could in total.

oh man, you're gonna get me in so much trouble when i start making changes i shouldn't make. i genuinely appreciate it

So I just discovered this channel. And now my day is wrecked as I am hooked. Thanks for your work! I’m a hobbyist low level coder and this type of hacking is so darn educational.

My god, this video is excellent. The way you break down your thought process and document it is wonderful for someone looking to learn ethical hacking and modding. Thank you.

Wow this video is WAAAY different than what I thought it would be. But wow, it is so much better than I thought, as well. Very interesting and informative.

Fantastic. Nostalgic. I've never actually wrote something complete for win32 and mfc, but I remember those save and load dialogues and how we had to call them.

This channel is awesome and I can't wait to see more videos like this!

I love this kind of stuff. In the last few years so many old games are now playable in modern OS's. It sure would be nice if an Internet Archive download of this patched version became available.

"I decized to spin up a Win11 vm to play the game" .. because you couldn't just spin up a Win95 vm instead?

Awesome video! Detailed, engaging, and concise!

I came here thinking I would see some classic old game gameplay and ended up receiving a reverse engineer free workshop xD

I didn't watch the entire video but here's two tips in case you didn't mention them: DosBox for old 16 bit executables (I played SimCity Enhanced that way, works perfectly!) and also Sysinternals ProcMon for finding out the reason for these issues. It tells you all the files and registry keys that the process tries to contact (also if those were successful or failed) and so you usually know pretty quickly (without any IDAing) which files and registry keys you are missing.

Your videos are so well done, I love it.

Wow. I haven't even thought about SimCity 2000 in probably 20 years. I studied some rudimentary computer programming when I was in high school (people were still playing SimCity 2000 back then), so I knew just enough to be impressed by your skills and to understand how little I know. This was very impressive. I felt as though I was watching a master performing their craft. Thanks for the memories of both programming and SimCity 2000!

In modern windows computers, at least on windows 10, if you double click a cd/dvd image, it will automatically load it on a virtual drive.

"why is it so hard to play old games?" because it's against the interest of video game and console companies that you can play old titles. if they let you do that (or not doing anything against it), you gonna spend less time with new titles and will buy less new games, and they don't like that idea. so they even intentionally try to eradicate those options, like suing emulator creators. i actually grateful for the PC platform, as (for now) this is the only platform when they can't tell you how you use it. edit: by the way, great video, i learned a lot

I fn love your videos dude, thanks for sharing the knowledge!

im glad you are working on getting it to work on modern system we need more people like you doing this kind of thing

Alternatively, of you're a Mac person who wants to play the old Mac version, that was 3 CPU architectures ago (before Apple Silicon 1. Intel, 2. PowerPC, and 3. Motorola 68K), so you'd just emulate System 7 on something like Basilisk II. Because modern computers are fast. Also, I don't understand why he's trying to debug the binary to figure out how to install the game. Just install in a Windows 2000 VM, take a snapshot of the filesystem before and after, use some CLI tool to spit out the filesystem and diff the before & after (I'm a Mac/Linux person, not terribly proficient in Windows command line, but Win 2000 was based on NT so there's little reason why you couldn't use fairly modern CLI tools), then copy all files it added to the newer Win 11 VM. Edit: I guess you'd have to dump the registry to text file too, and diff that. There must be tools for that.

Just to see what would happen I installed it on Linux/Wine after watching this video. It installed normally with the setup.exe then the it ran fine on first try. Though I am not that surprised Wine is usually more compatible with legacy games.

Very interesting to see what it took to get it cooperative with modern Windows 11. The save/load aspect especially tricky, as the rest seemed like things that may have been resolved if the SETUP program was actually able to do its thing. I know I would have just spun up a Win95 VM and run the setup and game in there, but it was actually really cool to see the steps you took to identify and fix the different errors. It took a long time to identify things, but it's interesting to see how "few" changes need to be made to essentially port it to run natively.

I probably have weeks of my teen years wrapped up in SC2K - it was a blast, but I def like the newer stuff with all the detail I wish could have been possible in that older game (Cites: Skylines is a great example).

Why the hell hasn't GOG hired you already... damn man! I just hope you could run a Patreon and use that to take some time to create real patches for these old software out there, so that people could get them running somewhat easily if they still own them. You'd do a huge service to archiving of these games and keeping them running!

funny how it works good in Wine 9.0-rc1 on Linux. Just have to play the game in the virtual desktop that wine has or it won't work and click on the task bar to get the window bar up and resize it to get the window the way you want it. The only problem is the window that has all the controls will not display on top of the city window so you can't have the city window fullscreen. this is a cool way to play it on an modern OS. But i'd say the best way if you have the hardware. Is to use 86box have it emu an 3dfx 3000 and install win98 and can run it in 1080p as long as you have the 3dfx 3000 drivers installed and play a lot more old school games like the 1st need for speed. BWT grate video

wow i learned so much, plus i had a good laugh XD subscribed

I loved watching this! It definitely brought up childhood memories of spending HOURS trying to get a new game to run on our Windows ME system...

It would have been easier to load a windows 98 vm install the game and extract the registry keys.

I’m so impressed by how you pull in expertise at every turn in this video. If you don’t mind sharing, I’d love to know what kinds (categories may be the better word) of development know-how you drew from, and how you built those skills in the first place

Truly awesome. Well done, sir!

bro I'm not interested on playing SimCity 2000 BUT I admire your dedication and I aspire to have as much technical knowledge as you the day I ever go back to some old game to patch it and play it by myself. Looking at you, road rash 👀 You got my sub, keep up the interesting videos coming :)

First? Magnificent video, mate

Thank you for patching the game! I hope gog is able to release this new and improved version you’ve created. Would be fun to jump back into the game after not having played it in 30 years

As an IT person i love the amount of technical effort you have gone too :) reminds me of being younger when i used to program stuff I would of personally run it in a virtual machine but where is the fun in that.

Just got this recommended, subbing right away

tldw: 16bit installers are massive pain in the butt to anyone installing old software. honestly, I'm surprised nobody created a tool for dealing with these. it's a rather well known issue with a lot of old software.

Since the installer is a 16 installer and the game is a 32 bit executable you should be able to just run the installer through NTVDM. This will allow the program to be installed and you’ll be able to run the program as a 32 a bit executable.

Just found your channel. What a great skill set you have.

I don't know anything about coding or programming (other than old school HTML coding), but I really appreciate your patience here! It's thanks to people like you that I've managed to play classic nostalgic games on Steam! Shout-out to you and every other programmer that works hard to bring old games to full functionality on newer operating systems, so that many of us can all relive older chapters of our lives!

This is a really interesting video. You expect it to be an "OMG game is broken!!1" clickbait but seeing how people get this stuff running properly is very interesting. There are other games like Total Annihilation people have been exe hacking for years and have only really gotten running perfectly recently after lots of community collaboration. In other cases like Caesar 3 they've rebuilt an entirely new engine. It's amazing how enthusiasts keep this stuff alive and even add in lots of functionality that make it look and play better than it even did in the first place on the correct hardware.

Why didn't you install the game on a Windows 95 VM and exported the registry key to a .reg file? That would have been much easier than the Reverse Engineering

and that is why i love the high seas … tons of original versions tend to already have tons of fixes in them to work on all windows versions and majority of the time they are applied by the game launcher itself as it detects what patch to run on what version

The fact that I know exactly how to do exactly this and I still feel like I know nothing and want to know how to do this makes your videos pretty magical. You seriously make this look a lot more appealing and interesting than it is to do in reality, but the payoff is unlike anything. I'd love to see more, but I really don't want to know a human being does this too often to themselves.

Love these reverse engineering videos of yours!

Well I have handled the registry issues multiple times, and I would wager your save/load issue is an associated registry line or registry limiter (May have an issue with the file folder/location pointers being in old dos/win 95 not having extended file name allowances) I don't recall if Sim City had a specific file location/controlled installer and whether you were allowed to cycle/choose where to install and load etc from. It has been a LONG time since I played it. Oh and remember old computer systems had set and default file pathing, and if you failed to set your pathing correct in the autoexec or config file a lot of games would not run.

You sir, are a very clerver man, well done! Although ir would of been lovely at the end of your video seeing it load up

That was an epic explaination of how you managed to get it working! Great content!

Nobody tell him about proton, it'll break his heart.

I'm no expert but maybe don't spin up a Windows *11* VM for a Windows 95 game? : p Seriously though, would it be "controversial" to put this up somewhere as a patch?

That was really good work. Kudos

Brilliant! Though since you were playing with VMs anyway, I may as well have just made a Win95 VM and tried it there. 😄

This was an amazing underrated video good job

Love these videos!

It was a good challenge for me, to understand the stuff. The important part was the STDCALL convention.. Stackpointer and to count the parameters right... In the 13th DWORD ...the flags :-) Then flip some bits and voila. Great Content !!! Thank You Nathan !

You just blew my mind. What I thought was going to be easy I realized you know so much more than myself.

I still have my boxed copy of this one from my childhood. Im so happy to see it actually working on a modern system even with a patch.

I want more video like that! Very cool video love it!

watching some of this old functions took me back several years

My favourite "look how smart I am" series. If I was gog I would hire you immediately