The Spelljammer game I never finished

This is a stub. I'm writing it before the work is done, and I'll put what happens at the hackathon in Progress, below.

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

I made it all the way to the end. Then a bug made the game impossible to finish. I never beat it.

The game is on GOG. None of its assets are on this site.

Why I'm picking it up

With AI agents, one person can take apart a 1992 DOS game, decode every file format, and rebuild it. I'm doing that at the Claude for Games hackathon in San Francisco, on October 12, 2026.

I want to refresh the game I loved, fix what broke it, and finally beat it. I'm also using the day to test REA, a reverse-engineering library.

The plan

Extract the GOG release. Run it in DOSBox-X, and treat that playthrough as ground truth. Decode the assets into open formats: palettes, sprites, the 3D ships and planets, maps, text, and audio. The tools for that are Ghidra, REA, and Python. Write the rules down as a spec. Then rebuild the game in Unity, and in VR.

The spec comes first. If I start in Unity from memory, I'll make a different game, and I'll paper over the bug instead of finding it. DOSBox-X stays beside the new build. When the two disagree, the 1992 game is right.

Progress

Coming soon / updates from the hackathon.

The project page is Spelljammer 1992 Reboot.