Re:Show HN: I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stoc...
by benstopics on Saturday February 14, 2026 @03:42AM
(#47012819)
No line numbers but you can use numbers as goto labels. It uses Dynamic Dialog Tools which is a Win32 wrapper which most of my "job" is gutting out those calls, implementing Single Responsibility in functions and plugging in Electron UI. And trying not to break EVERYTHING...
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Re:Show HN: I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stoc...
by flomo on Saturday February 14, 2026 @04:25AM
(#47013037)
Thanks for clarifying. Super smart approach to adopting legacy code to a modern interface.
Maybe I missed it, but are you still using the Powerbasic compiler or have you worked around that somehow?
Re:Show HN: I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stoc...
by benstopics on Saturday February 14, 2026 @08:23AM
(#47014343)
Still using PB compiler. Tried to reach out to the company that bought the right to it and killed it because I wanted to extract the parser from it and make it target LLVM to be cross platform, but after a year of trying to contact them I gave up. I will have to build my own compiler at some point with Claude Code which won't be too difficult as WSR only uses a subset of PowerBasic so. When I first tried to build a compiler two years ago I didn't understand all the gotchas in PowerBasic as I do now. But right now I'm just focused on testing the game, fixing bugs, and getting it to Early Access so many I can get up to minimum wage in sales with the time I have invested in the project!