Working native port of Stunts with 8 multiplayer over Internet

[HerrNove]

Consider that

* Stunts has not been commercially available for decades (GOG, Steam etc. never had it)
* Some of its original devs said they were okay with the game being distributed for free.
* The current legal rightsowner is unclear (Encore Software maybe?). No company has claimed to own Stunts's copyright in the last 20+ years.

I think you should have no problem, either legal and moral, by distributing the full game. The possibility that somebody complains cannot be mathematically excluded but it seems almost totally theoretical. In cases where companies wanted to claim back the rights of long-forgotten games they usually just kindly asked the modders to take down their projects before the new edition came out.

Which is why, even if I am strongly pro-copyright and pro-respecting the authorship of the developers of old games, I feel ok in publishing my mod of Stunts, under my real name even.

If you want to feel safer, your idea of making the mod depend on the user providing the original assets is good: that's what the XWVM project does, and they're dealing with Star Wars, one of the most precious IPs of one of the most copyright-aggressive companies on the planet.

Obviously no method can give perfect assurance of being 100% in the clear: but, retrogaming is a dirty job, and one must accept to get their hands a little stained.

[Alain il professore]

Hello my friends,

The more time pass, the more chances we get to erase the original "spirit" of the game we cherished as teenagers. French philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard had a word for what happens when the copy slowly takes the place of the original: the simulacrum.

Take, say, a fish. He will swim freely in the open water and have a beautiful livery, even sometimes for some species reswim the stream of his own birthplace to give birth again.

Now alter the fish just a little bit. Cook it and serve it in a plate. This is the stage when we alter the code of Stunts.exe with a small skidXXX.exe launch file. The code masks basic reality enough to make the cooked fish, even if better tasting, a distortion of reality.

But there are more stages of alteration: the resuls of what we altered now is "a beast". It makes us question the basic reality of what somebody else knew was called "Stunts". "Stunts without multiplayer? It never existed!"... "We are playing the ORIGINAL game!" Let's call it stage two of Stunts simulacrum. The fish is now sold precooked, in a form of a breaded fish fillet, designed in a shape of a fish. Oh! The irony!

Final form of tampering: The code of the game has no relation to the reality whatsoever, it's his pure simulacrum, in a sea of simulacra, in a simulation, in an ocean of simulations. For a fish, let's call it a chocolate treat out of a silicon matrix molded in the shape of a fish.

And this is where the paradox becomes beautiful.

At the end of the process, nobody remembers the fish.

We argue about whether the chocolate tastes right, whether the silicone mold has the correct proportions, whether the artificial scales are faithful to the original ones. We may even become extraordinarily good at reproducing them industrially. And one day, somebody who has never seen a river will look at our sweet creation and say:

"This is what a fish is."

Perhaps the greatest danger for Stunts is therefore not that we modify it. Games have always survived because people hacked them, studied them, extended them and loved them far beyond what their creators imagined.

The danger begins when the modification erases the memory of being a modification.

When the multiplayer version becomes Stunts.
When the rewritten physics become Stunts.
When our reconstruction becomes more authoritative than the strange, limited, imperfect 1990 program from which everything started.

Final Baudrillardian twist!

We wanted to preserve Stunts forever.

So we improved it so perfectly that we no longer needed Stunts at all.

A new simulation survived.

The original disappeared.

And somewhere, forgotten on an old DOS disk after 35 years of physical preservation, a lifetime for a preindustrial homo sapiens, a tiny 1990 executable is still waiting to remind us that some pipsqueaks could once do wonderful circus tricks, jumping out over the water tiles.

Yours, Alain il Professore.

[llm]

We wanted to preserve Stunts forever.

there is currently a port ongoing that targets DOS and tries to keep everything as original as possible (not a full reconstruction aka binary equality, not possible due to assembler-parts) but very near to the original so a vanilla/chocolate port, to keep the old spirit

but nothing will ever replace the original bits