Spelljammer 1992 Reboot

I played Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace in elementary school. Strategic Simulations published it in 1992, for DOS. I captained a magical ship through Realmspace, fought ballista duels, and boarded neogi warships.

I reached the end. A bug made the game impossible to finish. I never beat it.

I'm rebuilding it at the Claude for Games hackathon in San Francisco, on October 12, 2026.

Extract the GOG release and run it in DOSBox-X. That playthrough is the ground truth. Decode the assets into open formats with Ghidra, REA, and Python: palettes, sprites, the 3D ships and planets, maps, text, and audio. Write the rules down as a spec. Rebuild the game in Unity, and in VR.

The original is still for sale on GOG. None of its assets are on this site. REA is the reverse-engineering library I'm here to test.

The spec has to come before the Unity project. A rebuild from memory would be a different game, and the ending bug would get designed away instead of found.

DOSBox-X stays up beside the new build. When the two disagree, the 1992 game is the one that is right. The cost is scope. One evening can get the original running and the first formats decoded. A finished Unity and VR game does not fit in that evening, so the rest of the plan waits until after the hackathon.